Healthcare Technology Featured Article

March 31, 2009

Healthcare Technology and News: Ekahau To Demo Wi-Fi RTLS At HIMSS 2009 ACE


Ekahau will reportedly demo its latest product line series of Wi-Fi based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) tags at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society 2009 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago during the first week of April.
The RTLS tags are card sized and smaller radio frequency based dual way communication devices with long-life, rechargeable batteries that are auto activated only when signal bursts are requested or at predefined time intervals. The tags are location sensitive to within six inch diameter accuracy.

Ekahau cites best usage examples in hospitals where the tags can be used in conjunction with Fixed Location Beacons (FLB’s) to track expensive and life critical equipment such as defibrillators, patients’ beds and mobile stretchers, all hospital staff, visitors and even the patients themselves. The pin-point accuracy serves to leverage life saving intervention, 24x7x365 critical monitoring, and significantly reduce, if not eliminate, theft and unchecked inventory scatter. A T301-B Wi-Fi Badge is shown below.      

      
The tags identify FLB’s position alerting signals and communicate the location information to an RTLS server that precisely computes the whereabouts of each tag and allegedly even indicates if FLB positions have been altered or tampered with or are in unauthorized transit. The RTLS tags and beacons: do not require any cabling, boosters and software readers; eliminate choking the network at any node; do not interfere with local frequencies of hospital equipment such as defibrillators, x-ray and heart lung machines; and come with a single server software that provides open API support to integrate XML with common industry utility applications such as ERP and CMM.

"Based on evaluations of several systems on the market, we chose to work with Ekahau because its high performance Wi-Fi RTLS system was incredibly easy to install and operate," said Gerhard Kschwendt, senior director for ISM Siemens Medical Solutions, USA. “As other systems keep adding more proprietary infrastructure to their offerings, Ekahau has stayed true to its vision of providing high-performance solutions over standard Wi-Fi networks."

Marketing strategy wise, this demo is a well timed and smart move since America is slowly but surely embracing total health information technology related solutions, as reported by TMC, and wireless infrastructure, also reported by TMC, thought its ARRA 2009 initiative and the Fiscal Year Budget for 2009-10.

“As the worldwide investment in Wi-Fi technology increases, we are able to leverage industrywide economies of scale not available to users of proprietary systems," said Pauli Misikangas, Ekahau's CTO. 


Vivek Naik is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of Vivek's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jessica Kostek
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