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:
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
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