Bluetooth – Providing the superior RTLS Healthcare Solution
RTLS (Real Time Location Solutions) have been marketed in the healthcare space for almost sixteen years. All the past and current technologies have had their positives, but also negatives.
It seems everybody has had their own “proprietary” way of solving the issue of locating items in the healthcare vertical.
Technologies used have ranged from UWB (Ultra wide band), to WLAN, to ultrasound, to Zigbee, and proprietary frequencies and IR. If the solutions were that good at solving the real problem, why are they not ubiquitous?
It comes down to cost and lack of standards and solving the level of location accuracy required.
Bluetooth 4.2 and pending 5.0 have provided the potential next generation RTLS solution that could work to provide the first ever realized RTLS solution in the enterprise space.
While this is a pretty bold statement, you have to look at what has happened in the past couple of years.
When the smart phone came out it put a somewhat a reset to technology as www.zigbee.org and to a large part ANT www.thisisant.com The Smart Phone now has incorporated BTLE, so this has driven BTLE as the accepted standard not only among consumer devices but the enterprise.
When you have a standard embraced on such a consumer level, it tends to be embraced on the enterprise level.
Bluetooth also is following the sale maturation curve of Wi-Fi, i.e. Interoperability and wide spread adoption into multiple verticals thus is becomes the key to standardization.
www.bluetooth.sig
www.nordicsemi.com
Now moving forward toward the value of Bluetooth Beacons.
Bluetooth Beacons use Bluetooth Low Energy Proximity Sensing to be picked up by a compatible application or operating system.
Indoor positioning with beacons falls into three categories:
Implementation with many beacons per room
Implementation with one beacon per room
Implementation with a few beacons per building
Indoor navigation with Bluetooth is still in it’s infancy, but attempts have been made to find a working solution.
Around mid-2013 Apple introduced iBeacons
Google’s standard for Bluetooth beacons is Eddystone. The iBeacons strategy is similar to Apples, but with additional telemetry information. The telemetry data is sent along with the UID data. Beacon information includes both battery voltage, beacon temperature, number of packets sent since last startup, and beacon uptime.
The WLAN Enterprise now incorporates Bluetooth 4.0 into WLAN AP(s), from two companies. What does this mean?
Smart Phones, client devices that use Bluetooth 4.0, and or new technology solutions that incorporate Bluetooth 4.0 will be able to use the enterprise WLAN as the back haul RTLS solution.
This seems is the future pathway for location based (RTLS) systems in healthcare. The overarching question is should investments be made in proprietary RTLS type of solutions, when the ecosystems of BTLE and WLAN incorporation is happening in real time?
Integra Systems, Inc. www.integrasysgtems.org is currently working with designs and product roll out to solve the next generation RTLS solution with biometric authentication.
