Indoor location tracking services create new opportunities for businesses looking to make faster and better decisions based on real-time data. Due to the pandemic, the distance between two assets for social distancing has become a critical capability, as has privacy in respect to location data. With modern indoor tracking systems businesses can increase the productivity and safety of their workers, equipment, and work sites by:
- Ensuring assets are not lost or misplaced
- Faster asset retrieval times
- Improved capacity utilization
- Better worksite workflows and utilization
- More efficient responses to workplace emergencies and/or evacuations
- Less workplace injuries and accidents
- Ability to focus more on value added activities
- Less workflow interruptions through contract tracing
Indoor location tracking utilizes the following hardware and software integrations and implementations:
- Beacons, tags, badges and smartphones used to provide location data
- Battery, AC, or network-powered position sensors, transmitters or readers that communicate over proprietary protocols or industry-standard protocols
- Wi-Fi access points and additional components, such as gateways and bridges of other frequencies
- Location engines with a publicly documented northbound API that can use data from hardware, such as location tags and edge devices to provide indoor location information
- Management applications to configure and manage solution components, including battery life, component position, throughput and error rates to ensure proper functioning
- Analytics applications used to collect, combine, smooth and report data
The whitepaper is intended to help organizations plan and analyse their indoor location services requirements, by formulating the critical capabilities of indoor location services provided by the industry as of now.
Product/Service Definition
The indoor location services market consists of vendors that supply hardware and software components to provide services to enterprises, as well as public venues. Many different technology options provide location information. Differing algorithms, techniques, frequencies and architectures have a single aim: to provide the optimal location of an asset or person within one meter (three feet), which typically is approximately one arm’ s length. The technical capability must be paired with the business requirements, as well as the total cost of implementation.
Critical Capabilities
- Collect Differing Location Data
The solution must support technologies to collect data necessary for the static and mobile assets and people in the environments for the one or more-use cases that enterprises are deploying.
- Granularity for Indoor Location
The value of location is the ability to provide the granularity necessary to achieve required business value for the organization deploying a solution. For most applications, granularity of location is defined as less than one meter (three feet) for assets/people whether they are static or mobile.
- Distance Between Two Assets
Distancing between two assets (objects or people) has increased in importance because of the role of social distancing, determining the distance between people. But this can be extended to ensuring the safety of people and objects or objects as part of a collision avoidance strategy.
- Management and Security
Continual management and monitoring of indoor location components is important to ensure everything is functioning and be able to manage and monitor components for connectivity and security as well as their own.
Key capabilities also include:
- Onboarding, provisioning and authentication of devices used to provide location data
- Encryption of data, as needed, to eliminate man- in- the-middle attacks or spoofing
- Addressing GDPR, if shipping to countries that require it
- Scalability of Deployment
- Agility
This is the ability of the solution to address scalability and the expanding requirements of new use cases such as social distancing via the pandemic. Key capabilities also include:
- The ability to address staff duress, man-down or employee emergency situations
- The ability to integrate third-party tags/badges/wearables to run on your location engine or have data collected
- The ability to offer tags/badges/wearables that can be used by other vendor solutions
- The ability to detect and report the transition to an outdoor environment where requirements mandate indoor and outdoor tracking
- Privacy
Processing location data in combination with PII in a consumer or internal-facing employee setting may be covered by local privacy legislation. Vendors need to be able to address legal requirements, such as GDPR compliance or any other legislation that may apply.
- Integration in Applications
Most solutions won’t address location requirements for all use cases. Instead, the solution must integrate with ecosystem solutions to meet all end-user requirements.
Generic Capabilities
Accuracy
Accuracy is the primary feature desired in indoor location tracking systems, and also the most difficult to obtain. Typically, as the desirability of highly accurate location tracking increases so does the cost of implementing a highly accurate location tracking solution. Ultra-wide-band (UWB) offers the most accurate location positioning system at the lowest cost.
Coverage and Scalability
Coverage is the second most desired characteristic of indoor tracking systems. There is often a trade-off that occurs between coverage and accuracy (i.e. more cover = less accuracy and vice versa). Coverage is also heavily influenced by the presence of walls, equipment, other signals, and other people within the indoor tracking environment.
Adaptiveness
Indoor location tracking systems need to be able to function within a changing environment. Indoor work environments are not static, and suitable indoor location tracking systems need to be versatile enough to function inside of dynamic environments without sacrificing too much performance.
Sampling rate
The sampling rate of indoor location tracking systems refers to the number of positions obtained for an object per second. The higher the sampling rate the more computational power and energy is required, but more up to date and accurate location information is obtained.
Cost
There are several costs associated with indoor location tracking systems. These costs are operational costs, deployment costs, and maintenance costs. Some systems even require calibration which adds to their costs, while others can use existing infrastructure resulting in lower costs.
The healthcare industry uses indoor positioning systems to secure their assets and provide continuous patient’s status updates regarding inactivity, falls, wandering, abduction, and duress alerts. They are also used to monitor the flow of patients, monitor their care, manage logistics (transportation of equipment, samples, visitors, suppliers, and patients), staff workloads, and claim mitigation for accidents, staff/patient interactions, and geofencing violations. Specifically, indoor positioning systems are useful for applications related to safety for senior living, infant tracking and safety, patient flow and safety, hospital staff tracking, and EMS inventory tracking.
Kanoo Elite with its years of experience in understanding Internet of Things, precise positioning technology and spatial location big data, our solutions will help you achieve sub-meter positioning of personnel and materials with an accuracy of 0.1-1m. Relying on global spatial location data, Business data, our goal is to bring humanization, informatization, and intelligence to medical organizations. Kanoo Elite helps you gear up with advanced positioning system applicable to medical industry, by collecting and processing various location information data through base stations, tags, and positioning service platforms, in order to achieve precise positioning and interconnection of hospitals, nursing homes, assets, we help you build an intelligent health business platform, and comprehensively improve the quality of your medical and nursing services.
