Beacon based Personnel Location System
Scan Smart ID Personnel is a beacon based personnel location system. What are beacons? Beacons are small wireless transmitters that include iBeacon™ and Bluetooth Smart technology. They can be placed on walls or used with beacon cards’ replacing RFID and other technologies.
Beacons offer many advantages over other technologies, particularly a better ROI over RFDI technologies. Using the Kontakt.io location engine not only can employees be tracked when entering or leaving a facility but can be tracked on the premises allowing better management and security and safety.
• Employee or Contractor Entry and Exit of a location
Track employees or contractors when they enter or leave a site using beacons. You can use card beacons or track using a mobile app or watch app.
• On-Site positioning
There are two common ways to use beacons. First, the more common method is Real Time Location Systems – RTLS and is fixed readers and moving beacon tags. For Bluetooth, this is accomplished with tools like kontakt.io Location Engine and Gateway. The Gateway acts as the reader, collecting beacon data and sending it to the Location Engine for analysis. Common use cases include real-time employee monitoring and asset tracking.
The second method, which is commonly associated with beacons, involves fixed beacons and moving readers. Here, the beacons are attached to assets or points-of-interest and then paired with a mobile app. These methods are great for sending specialized messages to app users at the right time. For employees, this could be information about their accreditation or notification they in an unauthorised area. For supervisors this could be where an employee is on a site or updated scheduling information.
Using Beacons and Apps.
Using an app on a smart phone, smart watch, tablet or device allows the user the interact with beacons. Beacons, allows the sending of text, audio, images or video to the users device within a predefined distance so the user is aware that they may need to take action at a particular location. On site for example this can mean that safety systems can be set up around predefined zones. Take for example a hazardous area. The user can be notified when they move in or out of a predefined area as to the action they need to take displayed on the smart phone or device that they have. This could also allow the interaction with other alarm systems that can be wall mounted in the laboratory to display a warning message on a screen to alert other staff in the area.
A typical cloud based beacon system:
Transferring items between locations allows the item to be tracked by location and the action required to perform when picked up or at the delivery point conveyed to the user. This could be a check list or safety sheet to be read. In the case of a check list it could also display images of the item for visual identification as items are checked off or scanned.
• Always Know Who, Where and When
A well-developed strategy utilizing beacons and a mobile app will provide rich contextual data about your service base. No matter which interests you more — your visitors or employees — using location-specific data to create, demographic and behavioural statistics will identify hot spots, measure time spent at designated locations and track company workflow.
The new apps allows the level of competency of staff to perform functions within an organisation to be dynamically checked using a combination of these new technologies. Wall mounted beacons can be used to dynamically check that staff are certified to use equipment before allowing it to be operated. Checking paperwork is done is another vial role the new technology plays with the ability to dynamically change the paper work to be checked off depending on the app users authority.
Enterprise Mobility and Safety Apps
Using a Scan Smart Safety app on a smartphone, smartwatch, tablet or Bluetooth linked device allows the user to interact with proximity beacons. Such devices send a signal, alarm or prompt and the app reads that signal in the context of the user’s location, activity or authentication. This can trigger a variety of responses from the app depending on what that tag/ beacon is associated with. Beacons, can, for example, send text, audio, images or video to the users device within a predefined distance so the user is aware that they need to take action at a particular location. The new industrial beacons operate from -20C to +60C, are shatterproof, anti-static and waterproof to 10 metres so can be used in difficult environments.
