Real-time location intelligence has been the holy grail in healthcare for decades. There have been several different real-time location systems (RTLS) over the years, but the industry has yet to provide a solution that meets expectations. Marketing leads us to believe that room-level accuracy is what you get, but the reality is that at its best it shows the location within a department or area.
Early systems used IR tags on equipment and censors at doorways. This would theoretically show if something that was tagged was present in a room or hallway. This is ok, but over time tags break off and the censors over the doors do not always catch the tag that passes under it for various reasons.
Current systems leverage Bluetooth Low Energy technology, with a similar approach of having beacons plugged into walls, and tags on equipment. This is a bit better than the IR approach at times because BLE can reach a bit further out but it does create a new problem. The signal from a beacon can detect objects on floors above or below the beacon itself which can cause tracked equipment to "floor hop" on a map. To mediate this, more beacons get installed, which drives up the cost of the system.
In both instances, the location of the devices is projected onto a graphical map, where a signal strength distance and pixel count help to determine where things are. While this can help, there are no real-world coordinates that can be used to study patterns in the data or see the objects as they traverse the real world.
The ideal solution for locating equipment is to leverage indoor mapping technology and a fleet of mobile devices. These devices, which many hospitals have already invested in, are capable of detecting the position of equipment and can provide active and passive crowdsourced locations of assets without additional sensors or hardware.
NavvTrack supports the ability to generate custom QR codes that can be placed on any piece of equipment, and then scanned by anyone with an iOS device. By actively scanning the code, the indoor location and floor of that asset is reported and stored in NavvTrack. From here, teams can view a historical log of where the device has been reported, as well as see its last known location on a map. Using real-world coordinates, we can also report the locations of devices across the globe by leveraging GPS.
As technology in medical equipment advances, we see a future where BLE and UltraWide Band chipsets are built into medical devices. Those devices can be registered with NavvTrack so their locations will be reported passively by a mobile fleet. Our team will be productizing our R&D work on passive data collection to make this dream a reality sometime in 2025.
