Category: rtls

Beacons and Lone Workers

There are types of working where workers work alone without close or direct supervision. Employers have a legal duty of care to monitor such employees so that they can detect accidents, illness and, in some cases, an attack.

There are some rudimentary systems in place, particularly on sites such as airports, that use short range (1cm) RFID tags that workers have to periodically ‘check in’ to. With beacons, workers don’t have to check in and much of this is now automated. It also works at much larger ranges up to 300m.

Our BeaconRTLS system maps lone workers. Alerts can be created that show when people haven’t changed zone for a configurable amount of time. It’s also possible to trigger alerts when people enter or leave zones or when they press an ’emergency’ button on the beacon.

What’s more, the system can be used to map assets as well as people and when used with sensor beacons can detect and alert based on environmental factors such as temperature, humidity or whether doors are open or closed.

Contact us about BeaconRTLS.

Cow Positioning with iBeacon Technology

There’s a video at YouTube on the installation of Raspberry Pi based beacon detectors in a cow shed to detect the position of cows.

Beacon detectors

Beacon on a cow

Beacons can, in fact, do a lot more than just determine location. For example, it’s possible to track extra things such as temperature, humidity and unexpected movement. In the cow shed case, hall effect beacon sensors can be put on gates to alert when gates are open/closed when they shouldn’t be. The location data can be used to provide geofencing to alert when things, people or animals enter or leave specific areas.

Read more about Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) using beacons.

Making Sense of Indoor Location

There’s a recent research paper on Indexing for Moving Objects in Multi-Floor Indoor Spaces That Supports Complex Semantic Queries. It says humans spend 87% of their time in indoor spaces such as private residences and office buildings and it’s becoming more important to be able to derive meaning from indoor location.

The paper explains how outdoor moving object management technology, which is very mature, cannot be applied to indoor spaces. Instead you need software that not only understands floors but also multi-floors and inter-floor (elevators and stairs) cells. The paper describes an index that can store indoor moving objects in multi-floor indoor spaces that can support 3D spatial queries.

Beacon Locating Accuracy

There’s a useful article by Steffen von Bünau of Kontakt on Real Time Location Systems (RTLS). Steffen says:

“Accuracy is an expensive vanity metric unless it is necessary to get the job done.”

Most scenarios don’t usually need very accurate positioning and creating unnecessarily accurate systems is expensive. Steffen doesn’t say why they are expensive but one of the article’s comments provides an answer. Ultra wideband based RTLS is expensive compared to Bluetooth LE.

Also, accurate systems tend to need calibration that’s time consuming and costly in human resource. Calibration implies tuning to a particular physical and wireless environment. If the environment changes then so might the calibration.

The required accuracy of a RTLS should be derived from the business requirements.

Improving on Beacon Immediate, Near and Far

We recently highlighted an article on Beacon Trajectory Smoothing. Faheem Zafari, Ioannis Papapanagiotou, Michael Devetsikiotis and Thomas Hacker have a new paper on An iBeacon based Proximity and Indoor Localization System (pdf) that also uses filtering.

They use a Server-Side Running Average (SRA) and Server-Side Kalman Filter (SKF) to improve the proximity detection accuracy compared to Apple’s immediate, near and far indicators.

The researchers found:

The current (Apple) approach achieved a proximity detection accuracy of 65.83% and 67.5% in environment 1 and environment 2 respectively. SRA achieved 92.5% and 96.6% proximity detection accuracy which is 26.7% and 29.1% improvement over the current approach in environment 1 and 2 respectively

What’s interesting here is that the researchers have quantified the accuracy of Apple’s implementation in two scenarios. The accuracy isn’t that good and as the researchers have shown, can be improved upon significantly.

Beacon RTLS Accuracy

Steffen von Bünau of Kontakt.io has an interesting article on “Jobs to be done – Accuracy in Real Time Location Systems”. He asks:

Who will use the information and what is to be achieved with it?

He questions whether organisations need room level accuracy or location within a room.

As Steffan says, trilateration can be used for positioning within a room.

However, determining accurate location within a room is much harder and more expensive to achieve and needs fingerprinting. Fingerprinting involves going over the target area to sample beacon signal strengths that’s time consuming. It’s also the case that the more you tune these things, the easier it is that they can go out of tune when the environment changes. New or changed items in a room can easily change signal strength readings and cause the need for re-fingerprinting.

As Steffen says:

“Accuracy is an expensive vanity metric unless it is necessary to get the job done.”

Read more about beacons for RTLS and our BeaconRTLS platform.

Read about BluetoothLocationEngine™

Google’s Proximity Beacon API

Most beacon platforms are fairly limited in that they are designed around retail marketing scenarios. If you are creating a non-retail marketing solution you might want to look into Google’s little publicised Proximity Beacon API. It allows you to register beacons and have arbitrary data, called attachments, associated with them. What’s more, it supports the registration of iBeacon as well as Eddystone beacons and you can use it free of charge.

The usual usecase is setup via Google’s console followed by update from apps detecting beacons. Android and iOS example are available.

It’s not always apps that are used to detect beacons. For example, you might have a single board computer such as the Raspberry Pi or Bluetooth-WiFi gateway detecting beacons and a web front end managing and monitoring the beacons. Google also provides example scripts that show how other entities can be used to register, list and filter beacons. Alternatively, other entities might even call these scripts.

The storing of arbitrary data allows the proximity Beacon API to be used for scenarios beyond retail marketing such as sensing with sensor beacons and real time locating (RTLS).

New Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS) Article

We have a new article on Using Beacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS). It explains how beacons can be used with apps or gateways to automatically identify and track the location of objects or people. It also mentions how RTLS systems can be implemented using IoT platforms.

RTLS created with an Open Source IoT Platform

Areas where organisations have used BeaconZone beacons for RTLS include manufacture, warehousing and the tracking of equipment and people. The latter segment has included people on campus, lone workers and evidence based working (e.g. evidence based policing).