Last week, we hosted two webinars, called “5 Effective Ways to Improve Your Wi-Fi”.
A big thank you for the 500 participants, who remained on the line all the way to the end, although both times we ran 30 minutes overtime with the Q&A.
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.
How does Ekahau Mobile Survey, the yesterday-announced Wi-Fi analysis tool for Android phones and tablets work?
Please find few links to short videos covering much of the features. For some reason, WordPress did not work when I tried to embed these particular videos directly to the post (other videos would work). Sorry for the inconvenience of not being able to play the videos directly on this page…
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.
Just posted a couple of videos to YouTube, explaining how a couple of new features in the latest Ekahau Site Survey work:
Automatic 3D Network Planning (available in Ekahau Site Survey 5.0)
ESS automatically suggests Wi-Fi access point locations and channels based on your requirements, like voice over Wi-Fi, RTLS, or video
Hybrid Site Surveys (available in 4.6 and newer)
ESS performs active and passive site surveys simultaneously = less on-site work
Also, do remember there’s quite a few (older) UI videos at wifithatworks.com
Cheers,
Jussi Kiviniemi
Sr. Product Manager
Ekahau
