Ekahau real-time location and communication solution

“While others were unclear about their strategic direction for the future, Ekahau had a visionary perspective of what the location tracking market was going to be. They had a clear concept of who they are and where they were going with their technology. One of the primary reasons we chose Ekahau was for its accuracy, as well as its ease of deployment”
-Clay Fisher, Senior Director, Information Services, Carolinas Healthcare System

Location Made Easy
Ekahau Real-Time Location System (RTLS) solution finds assets and people and real-time – indoors and outdoors. All you need is a standard Wi-Fi network, Ekahau software and Wi-Fi tags.

With Ekahau RTLS, you can improve the efficiency of your business operations, save money and increase staff safety. Once in use, Ekahau RTLS keeps all key employees and assets visible, and decreases the time it takes to find critical equipment or staff members in an emergency. By streamlining operations, Ekahau RTLS allows you to focus your time and resources to your core business.

Make Mobility Work
Mobility is no longer a novelty. In today’s business environment, it is an absolute requirement for improving productivity and reducing costs. Wireless networks provide the means for data and voice communications to keep up with the mobile workforce. Businesses are seeking ways to track the whereabouts of personnel, partners, and inventory. Adding a location-tracking application to existing wireless networks gives businesses a simple, automated way to stay up-to-date on the location of any  item.

Enterprise Wi-Fi networks that are used for data and voice also provide an excellent platform for building accurate location tracking systems. Unlike other proprietary systems, Ekahau relies on standard 802.11 Wi-Fi wireless network to deliver a comprehensive real-time location system (RTLS) for locating valuable assets and people. Because Ekahau uses existing wireless network infrastructure, the deployment is cost effective. When installed, Ekahau RTLS does not interrupt other network activities or affect network communications.

As one of the unique RTLS features, Ekahau personnel badge T301B also incorporates a text message display, enabling wireless Wi-Fi text paging in combination with real-time location information.

Ekahau RTLS
With Ekahau RTLS, the location of assets and people is automatically updated and can be synchronized with other systems and personnel, that call for the information. Overall, the system at its best, optimizes management of processes by making them visible. Moreover, the system enables new processes, such as routing security personnel automatically to the location where a tag alarm button was pressed or tamper switch was activated.

Savings
Ekahau RTLS creates savings by:
o allowing businesses to lower their equipment inventory through better asset utilization
o time saved searching for assets and personnel
o fewer incidents of theft and lost assets.

Other non-monetary benefits include employee satisfaction, when personnel can focus on their core duties rather than trying to find people or equipment. Location information history produces savings by allowing businesses to analyze data and optimize their processes.

Asset Tracking in Hospitals
Improving the preventive maintenance process and equipment availability
One of the big challenges for hospitals today is the management of mobile medical equipment. This increases the strain on biomedical departments that are responsible for managing the equipment inventory.

Medical devices that are used for patient care in hospitals are subject to systematic preventive maintenance procedures, recommended by the WHO and required by different authorities. The goal for the maintenance procedures is to reduce the risk of equipment malfunction that could lead to errors in patient care.

For satisfying the maintenance requirement in practice, the biomedical department needs to locate certain type of medical equipment when the service technician is visiting the hospital campus. Finding the correct equipment manually is a sizeable task as the equipment can be anywhere.

Another challenge the biomedical teams are faced with, is the allocation, misplacement and the actual location of their medical equipment. One solution to the problem is to purchase or rent more equipment so that shortages become rare and caregivers can easily locate available equipment within short distance, but sourcing more and more equipment is usually not financially justified.

Solution
A simple remedy to the problem is to have a system that knows the whereabouts of all equipment in realtime, at anytime and everywhere. Ekahau RTLS (Real-Time Location System) offers a simple to use, web based user interface for finding the location of the equipment over a web browser, even those behind closed doors.

By implementing the Ekahau RTLS, any hospital staff member can gain access to any hospital asset location, in realtime. The equipment locations are shown clearly on a floor map or on a list with a name of the room where the asset is located. The user can search for a particular asset, a group of assets such as IV pumps, or use a combined search, such as IV pumps located on 3rd floor of a the main tower of the hospital.

Ability to find the equipment faster and having visibility to the asset locations allows better allocation and utilization of the equipment. With Ekahau RTLS the hospital biomedical team can answer rapidly to questions about the location of the closest equipment and make sure that the equipments are distributed to locations where they are mostly needed. When it is time for the preventive maintenance, a report of the equipment that need service and their last known location can easily be printed to the technician.

Product
The Ekahau RTLS consists of simple ready-to-use components that create the location system. The equipments are tagged with small battery powered radio tags. Tags are mounted to devices using double sided tape, Velcro or special mounting brackets designed for the purpose.

The tags use a standard Wi-Fi network for communicating and also for measuring radio signal strengths from Wi-Fi access point to the tag. The measured signal strengths are sent over the network to a server running Ekahau Positioning Engine (EPE) software. The EPE calculates the location estimates of the tags. The location estimates are based on the measured signal strengths reported by the tags. Finally the location estimates are shown to the user on a floor map or as a list to the user by application software called Ekahau Vision.

The Ekahau system is the only Wi-Fi-based system on the market that is capable of providing room-level accuracy using Wi-Fi without deploying proprietary chokepoints or readers, which can cause interference with medical equipment. Since Wi-Fi is typically deployed hospital wide, Ekahau RTLS can extend location visibility across the entire campus or several campuses without any additional costs.

For more information, please visit www.ekahau.com.