Real-Time Location with Alerting Can Help Make Schools Safer

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, from July 2009 to June 2010, there were 33 violence-related deaths in elementary and secondary schools in the United States. As recent high-profile reports of school violence across the country bring school safety to the forefront of national conversation, prevention, improving emergency management and reducing response times are top priorities. Better prevention and preparedness programs are the recommended course of action to keep our school communities safer.

School systems are actively searching for solutions and Real-Time Location System (RTLS) is a good option. The Ekahau RTLS is already being used in school systems to leverage the school’s existing Wi-Fi network with Ekahau Vision™ software to allow school staff and students to be visible at all time and provide a sophisticated alerting system that do not require map look-ups. Please see our Ekahau Case Study on School Safety for detailed information on Ekahau’s school safety solution.

We want to help school systems better prepare for safety situations and thankfully school systems are not alone in formulating school violence preparedness and prevention policies and programs. There are many resources available for parents, educators, school administrators and school board members through governmental and non-governmental agencies. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security have literature on creating an emergency plan and prevention of school violence, sample continuity emergency plans, information on grant funding for implementing safety projects and much more.

If you are searching for great resources to help management and possibly prevent school violence, please check out the following links.

Department of Education Emergency Planning Website

Center for Disease Control School Violence Prevention Website

Department of Homeland Security School Safety Resources and Grant Funding Website

Department of Homeland Security RUN HIDE FIGHT Video

Federal Emergency Management Agency School Emergency Plans Website

Center for Health and Healthcare in Schools Emergency Preparedness Website

In any emergency, every second counts. Preparedness and prevention are the recommended approaches for creating a safer school community.

Big Brother TV Show Contestants Tracked by Ekahau Wi-Fi RTLS Tags

The TV Show Big Brother uses Ekahau Real-Time Location System (RTLS) to track their contestants around the house, in Sweden). The system includes Ekahau T301W Wi-Fi RTLS tags (featured in the picture below), as well as Ekahau RTLS Controller location engine / tag management server.

Ekahau RTLS is the leading solution for tracking assets and people in enterprise environments. It does not require any additional infrastructure, as it utilizes existing Wi-Fi networks for tracking. In addition to Wi-Fi tags, the system can track smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

Big Brother Sweden Contestant with Ekahau Wi-Fi RTLS Tag

The Big Brother Sweden website displays the location of each contestant in real-time (screenshot below).

Big Brother House WiFi RTLS Tracking Powered by Ekahau RTLS

 

Cheers,
Jussi Kiviniemi
Ekahau

Video: Indoor Navigation Done Right

The problem with most mobile phone navigation apps is they just don’t work indoors. Just try to find your way through a huge hotel or a shopping mall.

To address this problem, our partner GAB has made a very nice indoor navigation app. It accurately guides you through to your destination in real-time, even including Google Street View type assistance in selected locations.

On a technical level, the GAB app combines indoor navigation intelligence with real-time location information from Ekahau Real-Time Location System. The location accuracy in the Ekahau RTLS is very high, typically few feet (a couple of meters) indoors. The position is updated every few seconds.

Check out the video below:

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Jussi Kiviniemi / Ekahau

Ekahau RTLS Enables Easy Christmas Shopping in London

The Westfield London site in W12 spans nine postcodes and is the largest city-centre shopping mall in Europe. The culmination of ten years of planning and building this iconic building with it’s undulating glass roof, is now home to over 265 designer and high street shops, and 47 places to eat.

Requirements:
Enhance the Customer Service ‘Excellence’ program by providing: 

1. Discrete and effective valet parking service
2. Discrete  and efficient  ‘Hands Free’ shopping service.

Applications:
Valet Parking – When a customer arrives at the shopping centre they swap their car keys with an Ekahau T301B Wi-Fi Tag. Once finished their shopping experience through the high profile stores they push the ‘red’ or ‘return’ button on the tag. This produces an email and pop-up screen within the valet parking service area, the team then using the vision ‘listing’ application arrange for the vehicles to become ready for collection. Prioritization is allocated by the location and time of the button alarm, the nearer the shopper the higher the priority.

Hands Free Shopping –  During the shopping experience the customer can utilize ‘Hands Free’ shopping function by pushing the ‘blue’ or collect’ button on the Ekahau T301B Wi-Fi Tag. This produces an email and pop-up screen within the customer service area, the team then using the vision ‘listing’ application arrange for the particular members shopping to be collected from the respective store. All items are then collected and returned to either the customer’s car or collection point.

> Check out the Video

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Annina Pierson / Ekahau Marketing

RFID Journal: UK Hospital employees get help in real-time with RTLS

The UK government is planning to require UK mental-health facilities to install RTLS technology. St. Andrew’s Healthcare, the largest Brittish non-profit provider of mental -health services, got proactive on this matter: They installed a Motorola Wi-Fi network and Ekahau RTLS.

Read the full article here: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/7948/1/1/

The RTLS system, consisting of Ekahau’s tags, location engine, and Vision application, allows the employees to call for help by pushing a button anywhere in the facility. The credit-card sized T301BD tags are carried by the employees on a lanyard. Once fully deployed, the system will consist of around 3,000 Ekahau tags.

The Motorola Wi-Fi system, covering the entire facility, was a convenient choice, and is a combination of infrastructure and Mesh Wi-Fi. The fact that Ethernet cabling is not required for all access points makes the installation easier, and saves some pounds. The Moto Wi-Fi mesh also provides self-healing functionality: If an AP breaks down, the others will take over.

St. Andrews previously had an emergency response system based purely on infrared, but that wasn’t as reliable. Whereas infrared only works in areas covered by the IR transmitters, Ekahau RTLS works anywhere where you have Wi-Fi coverage – which means the entire facility, and even some of the outdoor areas.

In terms of number of RTLS systems being deployed today, my feeling is employee safety is right up there with asset tracking (tracking high-value assets to find them when needed). It’s just that the asset tracking deployments are typically larger in terms of number of tags tracked. One thing is a fact: the market is right now growing at a phenomenal rate – and at Ekahau are happy to be leading the market.

Cheers,
Jussi Kiviniemi
Sr. Product Manager
Ekahau

Video: How Apollo Hospitals optimize their processes using RTLS

Apollo Hospitals in India has dramatically improved their patient flow by with help of RTLS (Real-Time Location System).

A short summary:

The problem was really capacity management: A large hospital with 250 patients going through many departments every day caused a lot of unnecessary waiting and wandering around, meaning lost dollars (or rupees actually).

The solution is a system called Patient Mantra, delivered by Icegein, and powered by Ekahau’s RTLS tags and location server. The Patient Mantra system is a smart application layer, taking in patient location and status information, as well as a complete understanding of the hospital processes. With that information, the system optimizes patient flow and capacity planning, resulting in tremendous savings. Plus, the patients can spend more time with their families and less in the hospital waiting room.

When checking in to the hospital, the patient is given a credit-card sized Ekahau RTLS tag, worn on a lanyard. The tag is then linked into the patient’s name and healthcare information.  When the patient goes to a certain department, the location information is delivered to the appropriate staff members, letting them know the patient is waiting for certain services. The buttons in the tags are pressed by staff members to indicate, for example, that the patient is now being treated, or has finished the treatment. With this information, important real-time information about wait and treatment times can be analyzed.

If wait or treatment times become overly long, alerts can be given. And if a patient is leaving the facility without completing all the tests, the system can alert the personnel. Of course, patients can also alert the staff should they need urgent assistance.

In addition, thanks to the up-to-date information about the completed processes, the patients can see from the hospital monitors where to go next.

The system also produces useful reports, covering treatment times, wait times, and so forth.

Enjoy!

Cheers,
Jussi Kiviniemi
Sr. Product Manager

Huge RTLS asset tracking deployment at Clarian Health

A couple of weeks ago, Ekahau announced another huge RTLS deployment, this time at Clarian Health in Indiana. The system will consist of 10,000 T301A asset tags in multiple hospitals,  Ekahau RTLS Controller (the location engine), and Ekahau Vision application. The complete press release can be found here: http://www.ekahau.com/news/readallnews/press-releases/222-clarian-health-and-ekahau-partner-for-enterprisewide-real-time-location-solution.html

A while back, I wrote about another huge RTLS deployment (blog entry: http://ekahau.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-worlds-largest-rtls-healthcare-deployment/) in Ohio.

Of course, most of the RTLS deployments we at Ekahau do go “under the radar”, so the public will never know of their existence. Last week, for example, we sold a 15,000 tag system to the middle east, but it’s not publicly announced yet. Since we’re typically not installing additional infrastructure with the RTLS deployments, and the system deployment is pretty quick, the factories producing the tags are working overtime! Exciting times.

Anyhow, the Clarian deployment is just another example where a consortium of large healthcare facilities already has a Wi-Fi network, and has a problem with overly large asset inventory and rental costs, and not being able to find assets when needed (on the hospital floor, and for  maintenance). For Clarian, it made perfect sense to deploy Wi-Fi based RTLS.

Clarian is expected to move to other tracking applications as well, including temperature monitoring and patient flow analysis.

Maximizing Staff Safety with Wi-Fi RTLS

It’s a fact that RTLS is providing huge savings for healthcare facilities by enabling quicker finding of hospital assets. Asset tracking has been one of the first RTLS applications where ROI could be easily proven. And that’s probably why asset tracking in hospitals has became the most common application for Wi-Fi RTLS.  Good public examples include the 15,000 tag deployment at OSU Medical Center and Chandler Hospital in Kentucky.

Then there’s been a lot of talk and also some good implementations of RTLS covering all kinds of applications outside of asset tracking. Such apps include finding children on large cruise liners and amusement parks, ensuring personnel safety underground, finding vehicles on huge parking lots, and tracking consumer behavior in retail stores. But these apps are yet to make a real break-through: We have made five or less installations for each application genre, as opposed to deploying asset tracking installations every week.

So, asset tracking in healthcare  still remains the biggest driver for Wi-Fi RTLS. But the clear runner-up application has become staff and patient safety - especially in healthcare but also in other verticals.

Here’s an example scenario of how a Wi-Fi RTLS staff safety application works:

• Employees (nurses, doctors, miners, you name it)  wear credit-card sized Wi-Fi tags. Patients wear wristwatch-sized tags on their wrists.
• When a threatening situation takes place, or a patient is in trouble, the employee or patient can either push a button or use the pull-strap (on employee tags) to activate an alarm
• The alarm information includes the person sending the alarm, as well as the person’s location
• The alarm information is sent to the administrator, nurses, and/or the nearest security guards. The appropriate staff members all carry  Wi-Fi tags that include a displays that shows where the alarm was escalated. Alternatively, the alarm can also be sent as an SMS, a voice message, and the like.
• The staff members know who needs assistance and exactly where, and can rush to assist the person in trouble

Ekahau T301BD (credit-card size with display) and T301W (wristband) tags

To prove my point, here’s a few actual customers taking advantage of RTLS staff safety:

• Royal Ottawa Mental Health Center  in Canada
• Apollo Hospital Gennai in India
• ESSAUDE Hospitals in Portugal
• St Jerome Hospital in Quebec, Canada
• KEH Hospital in Berlin, Germany
• Ditan Hospital in China
• Alexandria Retirement Community in VA, US

In Finland, where I live, nurses and social workers have been injured and even lost their lives because they had no way to sound an alarm. We actually did our first healthcare staff safety deployments in Finland, but now US, Canada, Germany, India, and other regions are catching up.  In regions outside the US, staff safety is typically the first RTLS application installed. In the US, asset tracking typically leads the way, followed by staff safety.

Speaking of RTLS applications in healthcare, wireless temperature monitoring is suddenly becoming huge.  The fourth app I want to mention is healthcare is process flow optimization. But more about these two later.

When describing the staff safety app, someone always brings up the “Big Brother” issue. The simple answer is: the system can be configured so that the employees are only tracked when the alarm has been activated. Maximal privacy, maximal safety.

It’s hard to calculate an ROI for a saved life. But since setting up this type of a system requires no extra infrastructure (assuming the facility already has a Wi-Fi network), it’s not expensive or complicated to improve the safety of your employees and patients.

Sorry for the long post, let me know if you want them shorter in the future.

Cheers,
Jussi

Jussi Kiviniemi
Sr. Product Manager
Ekahau

Huge RTLS Deployment in RFID Journal: http://bit.ly/8U2D6r

There’s a nice article in RFID Journal about the 15,000 tag / 5M square feet deployment.

OSUMC’s director of technology Chad Neal was interviewed also, so it’s not just your average vendor hype. Chad even talks about the evaluation, the accuracy results, the use cases, and so on.

Healthcare Asset Tracking in Florida

Since some of you may not be on the Ekahau news list, I’ve also put summaries of our press releases here. This time, it’s about – suprise, surprise – a healthcare RTLS deployment.

If you have no time to read through all the marketing hype in the press release, here’s a summary: Flagler Hospital, after evaluating various RTLS players (careful evaluation is always a good idea), selected Ekahau RTLS for tracking clinical and IT assets. In addition to various Wi-Fi RTLS players, Flagler also investigated UWB technology as a possible option but decided not go with that in the end.

The hospital is located in St. Augustine, Florida.

As Cisco is the market leader in Wi-Fi by far, and Cisco and Ekahau having a partnership, it’s not a huge surprise that this deployment also runs on a Cisco Wi-Fi network.

> Link to the press release