Skyview High School Gives Ekahau RTLS an A+ after lockdown drill

Ekahau school safety badge pictured above.

 

KTVB of Idaho reports that Ekahau Real-Time Location System (RTLS) scored an A+ in the lockdown drill at Skyview High School yesterday afternoon. Skyview was very pleased with speed of the system so emergencies are attended in under a minute. “From the time I pulled it [panic switch], to the time the announcement went off, it was probably 15 seconds. And then less than a minute before Officer Ford walked in, so it was very fast,” said senior Toby Anderson, the student who activated the lockdown alarm. Police Chief Craig Kingsbury said, “There’s no waiting. There’s no explaining. You’re not going to lose precious seconds trying to justify why you need help. Help’s just going to come.” Chief Kingsbury is sharing the test results from Skyview High School to show police departments across Idaho how well Ekahau RTLS works for school safety. Chief Kingsbury hopes to get Ekahau RTLS system into every Idaho school.

When the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) badge’s panic switch or ripcord is pulled by a staff member, this triggers the school to go into instant lockdown. Also, every badge holder receives an alert notifying them of the lockdown, so classrooms can be secured quickly and effectively. The school’s resource officer’s badge alerts him of the location of the emergency (and police dispatch also receives this information instantly) so he can respond in less than a minute.

“One of the biggest positives of the [RFID] badges is the shortened response time in a serious situation”, Will Barber, Skyview’s Lead Building Administrator, said. “Previously, teachers had to leave the classroom or call the school’s office to get help in an emergency.”

One teacher reports that she already used the system for a real emergency. “I actually used it [Ekahau RTLS] a week ago for a health emergency that happened in my class, and they came really quick for that too. So this is actually the second time I was able to use it, and it was really fascinating,” said English teacher Terri Bentley. Also, Bentley commented that she was attacked leaving school ground a few years ago and system like this would have been very valuable to have then.

The Idaho Press Tribune reports that before the installation of the Ekahau RTLS system, the school’s secretary was the designated person who could issue a school lockdown using the intercom system. But Police Chief Kingsbury said this system was problematic because it took much longer to issue the lockdown and even more time lost to figure out where to send the school’s resource officer. “If an active shooter were to take that person out, there’s no other person to call a lockdown,” Kingsbury said. “But now, any staff can call a lockdown. This makes it [emergency response protocol] less dangerous.”

The Idaho Statesman reported over the weekend that Skyview High School in Nampa, Idaho is the very first to test a new ID badge system that can alert everyone of a school emergency and send the location of the person in distress. The notification badge technology is called RTLS and uses the school’s Wi-Fi network to send help messages directly to police and all other staff members carrying the RFID badges with the wearer’s exact location. This system is different than most common notification systems because the location of the wearer is available in real-time. The police or other staff members can view floor maps of the school and see exactly where all staff members wearing the RFID badges are located. RTLS is currently used in several verticals including mental health for staff duress.

For more information on how Ekahau RTLS works for school safety, check out our school safety solution case study from a deployment in German school system.

Skyview High School Installs Ekahau RFID-over-Wi-Fi™ Badges Locate Students During Emergencies and Keep the School Safe

Schools all over the U.S. are looking for innovative ways to ensure school safety. Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) are one component of a school safety everyone can agree on—RTLS gives police, administrators and teachers that visibility.

One school in Nampa, Idaho is testing a RTLS system using the school’s Wi-Fi network to keep their student’s safer. Skyview High School’s School Resource Officer Brad Ford and School Counselor Mandy Petty were challenged to think outside of the box to make the high school safer. Ford says that Ekahau’s solution peaked his interest because, “we wanted to do something where it was not evasive into the school, where we didn’t want to create a prison environment for the student.” Knowing the exact location of an individual during an emergency can shorten response times and prevent death and injuries.

Ekahau active RFID badges show the actual location of 75 staff members who volunteered to participate in the Ekahau pilot project. Ekahau Vision™ software displays the exact location of staff members on school floor plan maps via web browser. With the Ekahau RTLS badge, a Skyview HS staff member can move the school into lockdown in 4 seconds with a pull of a panic switch on the badge. All staff and area police receive the lockdown message on their Wi-Fi badge so that school safety protocols can be enacted immediately. If a lesser emergency arises, the staff member can press different buttons on the badge to communicate for assistance from medical to police.

Petty comments that, “It’s [Ekahau RTLS] a component that I think was missing from schools, just that immediate communication.” Ford said that Ekahau’s badge system may change the police and schools approach an active shooter situation. Adding location awareness to a school’s safety plan was such a compelling idea, that an anonymous donor gave the estimated $30,000 to Skyview because the school convinced the donor that Ekahau RTLS was their ideal solution.

To end, Petty related that, “The money is out there, it’s just a matter of what our kids’ lives are worth. Look at what we spend to protect our banks, our cars, our homes. When do we start protecting our kids and what is the dollar value to that?”

For more information, check out the news coverage and videos from the following sources:

KTVB – Technology helping to improve safety at Nampa school

KBOI 2 – Skyview High puts new security system to the test

ABC 6 – Local high school leads the way in school safety technology

Idaho Statesman – ID badge alerts tested at Skyview High School to stem school violence

Idaho Press-Tribune – Skyview High School pioneers emergency alert badges

For more information on school grants from the Ekahau blog, please see our prior post entitled, “Real-Time Location with Alerting Can Help Make Schools Safer” or our blog post following federal funding for school safety here.

Did you see Ekahau RTLS (RFID-over Wi-Fi™) in Times Square?

RTLS sighting in New York City — Ekahau RTLS made its first appearance in Times Square with an ad on one of the large jumbotrons. The ad features Ekahau RTLS Vision™ software highlighting the company’s business intelligence platform and capabilities.

Check out the picture below to see Ekahau’s ad in New York City.  

43% of Hospital Executives Say Largest Capital Investments Will be in IT

Becker’s Hospital Review reports that according to the Spring 2013 edition of the Economic Outlook survey, 43% of hospital executives stated that their largest capital investment over the next year will be for healthcare IT and telecommunications. Just two years ago, the same survey found that only 21% of hospital executives said that HIT would be the largest capital expenditure. The Economic Outlook survey polled 530 hospital C-suite executives, materials and practice area managers. These survey results further confirm that hospital systems are interested in using HIT to increase efficiency and overall quality of care.

The Premier healthcare alliance’s Economic Outlook further substantiates that demand for technologies including RTLS (Real-Time location system) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) will exponentially increase in the next few years. Another recent study found that the RTLS market is estimated to reach $4 billion dollars by 2022.

Now that hospitals have undergone EHR implementations, they are ready to consider and fund RTLS RFID-over Wi-Fi™ projects that deliver hospital-wide tracking with business intelligence helping their scheduling, patient care, supply chain process and costs and much more. Location-based business intelligence software give hospitals an analytical tool to improve workflows, create better staff safety, optimize and reduce equipment rentals and increase patient satisfaction increasing staffing. RTLS using business intelligence software can reduce OPEX and CAPEX while increasing revenues and productivity.

OSCUMC and SAMC are already experiencing and attempting to quantify the RTLS with RFID over Wi-Fi™ ROI. Check out Ekahau’s case study on OSCUMC for more on the ROI of business intelligence through RTLS using Ekahau Vision™.

See the screenshot below of the Ekahau Vision™ easy to use business intelligence interface.

Want to become a master in planning, deploying, analyzing and troubleshooting Wi-Fi infrastructure with Ekahau Site Survey, Ekahau Spectrum Analyzer and Ekahau Mobile Survey

The Ekahau Certified Survey Engineer (ECSE) training covers all the latest Wi-Fi challenges & standards like BYOD and 802.11ac with requirements, capacity requirement, auto planner etc. covering the full Wi-Fi (WLAN) Life Cycle.

The latest ESS version fully supports 802.11ac network planning, capacity analysis, and site surveys. ESS enables simulation to show how upgrading from 802.11n to 802.11ac will impact network capacity. ESS also allows optimizing channel plans for 5GHz and 802.11ac in order to support the new 80MHz and 160MHz channels.

The 2-day ECSE training course includes lots of labs and hands-on exercises and a certification examination on the third day. Students must pass the exam to receive the ECSE certification

Check out the next training course dates and location on our website http://www.ekahau.com/ecse
The webpage also includes detailed course and exam descriptions and prerequisites.

Exciting Features added to Ekahau Vision

We have recently added to our RTLS solution, especially in the area which is our specialty as the only RTLS provider with 2-way messaging via our Wi-Fi badge tags: safety and security.

Working with customers, we wanted to enhance customer experience for those using our safety alert solution. We came up with two key enhancements to our Ekahau Vision^TM application. One feature is centered around the messaging on the staff tags and the other feature is centered on events analysis, for example, alarms triggered with a pull on our patent-pending badge safety switch.

Read more on the new Ekahau Vision^TM Messaging Center and Event Forensics Replay features.

Ekahau Vision™ Messaging Center

Ekahau’s badge tag for staff, guests, patients, teachers and students is unique in the RTLS world. It’s the only active RFID over Wi-Fi™ badge to offer text on a badge LED, so 2-way messaging is enabled on the tag.  Our latest addition to Ekahau Vision^TM is a completely new feature called Messaging. See the screenshot below:

The process for sending a message is simple. Using Ekahau Vision™ software from Ekahau, find the people (badge-holders) you want to message from a drop down list, write your unique text message in the neat display that mimics the appearance of a badge tag and click Send. That’s it. In three short steps, you are done. Mass communications also become easier, and if you spot an emergency showing red on the map, you can send people away from the area via text notification, so they don’t run towards the danger zone.

The mobile phone slogan “Connecting people”, is finally married with location visibility, capturing the notion that “you can’t solve what you can’t see. Ekahau goes further by integrating 2-way communications and location. Not only you can send a message, you can make sure that your message will reach the right people in the right place (at the right time, when they need it). Imagine all the possibilities of adding messaging into your RTLS solution.

How does messaging help with security?

Now you can search for people located in specific areas and alert them with a simple click and your alert message will spring into their tag’s display. If preferred, you can customize alert messages with a particular sound, like a siren, so that the recipients know, without even looking at their display, that the message represents a security alert. This is a powerful means of conveying security alerts and messages.

Emergency Event Forensics Replay

A staff tag alarm sounded at 9:26 AM; was everyone in the right place and did everybody react correctly according to emergency procedures? It is difficult to tell after an emergency if everyone acted according to plan without a tool that allows an analysis of the event. Ekahau listened to our customers and we built a tool to help answering those questions called Events Forensics Replay^TM into our software.

Ekahau Vision^TM Forensics Replay allows a complete post emergency analysis from the time the event started to the time it stopped. Everyone who’s been alerted by a message to their staff tag will be seen in the visional replay for the entire event. See the screenshot below of Ekahau Vision™ Forensic Reply™.

The ability to travel through time and view a past event to see how everyone reacted is something we, at Ekahau, are very excited to offer our customers. We know this capability can allow security to analyze their facility’s performance and identify every bottleneck in the system. By analyzing the bottlenecks security procedures and policies, security and emergency planning can be improved to provide a safer environment.

Stay tuned; we have more exciting news very soon on new features and offering to our RTLS solution set.

Imagine a Hospital without Waiting Rooms—JISF is Practically Doing It Today

“Imagine a hospital without waiting rooms”—RTLS has your attention now. This week, GE Healthcare released a new Matrix-themed ad “Agent of Good” showcasing the power of real-time location visibility in hospitals. Real-time location connects caregivers, patients and devices according to GE Healthcare—it “helps hospitals treat people better”.

If your hospitals already standardized on Wi-Fi – what most hospitals use by default for device connectivity then you’re ready for tag-less location tracking when it becomes reality.  RTLS over Wi-Fi has become the norm as more medical devices evolve with embedded Wi-Fi chips and hospitals seek to leverage their existing Wi-Fi network investment. Today, Ekahau’s RTLS uses active RFID-over-Wi-Fi technology and offers an open API to integrate with other devices, so that hospitals have a future-proof, whole-hospital solution that optimizes patient queuing and more.

Say good-bye to waiting rooms, for good. Joint Implant Surgeons of Florida uses RTLS today to optimize wait times and patient queuing based on the type of patient visit and average care times. Read more about RTLS-based patient queuing at: Joint Implant Surgeons of Florida.

Ekahau RTLS Wi-Fi badge can message patients and caregivers to minimize wait times and even alert if a patients wanders into a restricted area.