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AeroScout Unveils New Asset-Tracking Platform
A hospital using a Wi-Fi-based system may decide that in certain scenarios, it also wants to use UWB active RFID tags and interrogators so it can determine the exact location of assets. It may want to use UWB to document that an infusion pump was in a specific room at a given time, for instance, and within inches from a patient (also identified by means of a UWB tag), thereby indicating the pump is being used on that person.
"There are companies that have spent a considerable amount of money in recent times putting in Wi-Fi networks. In many places in those facilities, they don't really need to know, down to 12 inches, where an asset is," says Greg Clawson, Time Domain's VP of worldwide sales and marketing. "But they also see the value in precision tracking. Think of an infusion pump, sitting in a storage closet. A Wi-Fi system can handle that. But what if they want to document not only where a pump is, but what it is doing? If they can document that a particular pump is within 30 inches of a particular patient, they could probably use that information for billing, and to flag that pump for a cleaning in the near future."
To enable the tracking of passive UHF RFID tags, AeroScout worked with Reva Systems to integrate the Reva Tag Acquisition Processor (TAP) appliance, which manages passive UHF RFID interrogators, including those complying with the EPC Gen 2 or ISO 18000-6C standard. The TAP appliance feeds data directly into MobileView 4.0. According to Slobin, the combination of active Wi-Fi and passive RFID would provide a company the ability to track, in real time, the location of a Wi-Fi-tagged container filled with individual items fitted with less expensive, passive RFID tags.
Regarding the updated MobileView 4.0, Slobin says AeroScout has improved the graphical user interface (GUI) to make the software easier to navigate, as well as viewable on handheld devices. The software platform is also more scaleable, thanks to improved database design. "Instead of being able to track tens of thousands of assets in [MobileView 3.1]," Slobin says, "now we can track up to hundreds of thousands of assets."
The software now has 17 different alerts that can be triggered (compared with 11 in the prior version), including if an asset moves from one zone to another, if there are too few assets in a specific zone, or if the tag's battery is running low. Companies can now institute access control, thanks to support for the standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which defines a method for organizing directory hierarchies and interfacing to directory servers.
The Ultra-Wi-Fi tags and interrogators are expected to ship toward the end of the first quarter of 2008, with MobileView 4.0 available in the second quarter.
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"There are companies that have spent a considerable amount of money in recent times putting in Wi-Fi networks. In many places in those facilities, they don't really need to know, down to 12 inches, where an asset is," says Greg Clawson, Time Domain's VP of worldwide sales and marketing. "But they also see the value in precision tracking. Think of an infusion pump, sitting in a storage closet. A Wi-Fi system can handle that. But what if they want to document not only where a pump is, but what it is doing? If they can document that a particular pump is within 30 inches of a particular patient, they could probably use that information for billing, and to flag that pump for a cleaning in the near future."
To enable the tracking of passive UHF RFID tags, AeroScout worked with Reva Systems to integrate the Reva Tag Acquisition Processor (TAP) appliance, which manages passive UHF RFID interrogators, including those complying with the EPC Gen 2 or ISO 18000-6C standard. The TAP appliance feeds data directly into MobileView 4.0. According to Slobin, the combination of active Wi-Fi and passive RFID would provide a company the ability to track, in real time, the location of a Wi-Fi-tagged container filled with individual items fitted with less expensive, passive RFID tags.
Regarding the updated MobileView 4.0, Slobin says AeroScout has improved the graphical user interface (GUI) to make the software easier to navigate, as well as viewable on handheld devices. The software platform is also more scaleable, thanks to improved database design. "Instead of being able to track tens of thousands of assets in [MobileView 3.1]," Slobin says, "now we can track up to hundreds of thousands of assets."
The Ultra-Wi-Fi tags and interrogators are expected to ship toward the end of the first quarter of 2008, with MobileView 4.0 available in the second quarter.
