Jan 20, 2021Since spinning off last year from RFID firm Mojix, southern California Internet of Things (IoT) company Acceliot has been providing real-time locating system (RTLS) hardware, as well as end-to-end solutions, to manufacturers, data centers, oil and gas corporations, and logistics and healthcare providers. Acceliot says the need for greater efficiency and intelligence during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the evolution of IoT solutions often leveraging multiple technologies, has meant that its customer base has been expanding.
Acceliot is now filling an evangelist role for IoT technology across numerous industries, its leadership reports. The company was launched by CEO Shawn Manesh and CTO Paul Barriga, both of whom had led many of the early, and some of the largest, deployments of Mojix technology to Fortune 500 companies. Manesh had been Mojix's senior VP, while Barriga was its VP of product management.
Acceliot CEO Shawn Manesh and CTO Paul Barriga
As part of the spinoff agreement, Acceliot has exclusive rights to Mojix products, including its line of STAR and STARflex RFID readers. Additionally, Mojix's original RFID hardware team has joined Acceliot, according to Barriga, who also leads Acceliot's R&D and support teams. Acceliot assumed the development, manufacturing, sales and distribution of Mojix's RFID hardware and MCON middleware, while Mojix focuses on its software platform solutions. RFID technology development began in 2006 at Los Angeles-based Mojix, an early provider of RTLS solutions leveraging passive UHF RFID.
The STAR reader system includes a single reader and a star-shaped array of antennas that can be installed overhead, providing real-time location accuracy at a distance of approximately 3 feet via passive RFID tags. In 2015, the Mojix team acquired software company TierConnect, along with its Vixiz IoT software, enabling it to offer complete, configurable software solutions. The company has been developing software to provide customers with full RFID solutions, Barriga says, adding, "It became apparent that carrying the RFID hardware product line [in addition to full solutions] was diluting their effort. The timing, then, was right to do this spinoff."
In November 2019, Acceliot—named for its plan to accelerate IoT technology—was founded. Although the company has been operating since then, it did not publicly announce the agreement until this past December. "Today, we want to let the market know the change has happened," Manesh states. "We have a forward vision and are now developing a marketing campaign. We wanted to let the market know this change has happened."
Acceliot offers customers full IoT implementations with passive RFID that can be used to locate tagged items in real time via the STAR overhead readers. It also can employ third-party hardware to read RFID tags. Increasingly, however, its customers have been seeking to integrate other technologies, such as GPS, to capture a variety of data points, depending on a particular application's needs. As a result, Acceliot focuses on offering an integrated IoT system that draws data from RFID and a multitude of other sensors, Manesh says. The Acceliot system can harvest and export that data to most third-party analytics IoT platforms, the company says, and the information is then provided on a single dashboard.
The company has accomplished much of its early growth during the global pandemic, Manesh says, and its technology has been in high demand, in part driven by pandemic-based demands in various markets. In fact, he adds, the pandemic is driving a digital transformation, with the need for highly efficient operations. Since the onset of the coronavirus, consumer demand for products, received fast and delivered through a variety of channels, has meant that manufacturers and other supply chain members have had to boost their efficiency, and IoT technology has helped to enable that transition. "The pandemic highlighted the need for super-efficient logistics, distribution, manufacturing and supply chain," Manesh states.
Manesh's expectation is that the systems built to address the pandemic will be required long after the COVID-19 threat has passed. "Digitalization will prepare us for other demands, like natural disasters or other pandemics," he says. To fully digitize supply chain operations, businesses are seeking a variety of sensors and greater intelligence to manage the collected data. "We need infrastructure that measures RFID," but that also leverages software tools, such as AI and blockchain, to provide automated data collection and management for real-time visibility and intelligence.
Since its launch, Manesh reports, Acceliot has deployed its solutions at hospitals and global automotive manufacturers, as well as with defense contractors. The company also serves the oil and gas industry. Hospitals are using Acceliot's RFID data to understand the locations of ventilators and other equipment used to serve the high volume of patients who arrive at their facilities with COVID-19, or for other healthcare services. Its IoT system keeps track of PPE inventory and sends order alerts if stock volume is low.
The UHF RFID tag ID data captured via the STAR readers is interpreted in the software and displayed for users seeking specific equipment. It can also be used by hospital managers to better understand utilization and analyze when equipment is being under-utilized, for instance, and thus may not be needed onsite or may need to be stored at a different location. The technology is also being used at automotive manufacturing sites to track the locations of supplies and finished products as part of a work-in-progress system.
Some large venues, such as stadiums, are employing the technology to track hundreds of thousands of people for security purposes or for foot-traffic analysis, Manesh notes. Acceliot created a solution for an unnamed construction company that offers building environmental efficiency. By deploying Acceliot's overhead RFID readers within new structures, and by combining them with integrated sensor tags, the building's management can offer tenants additional services, such as managing the environment or tracking assets.
For instance, by outfitting the building with RFID temperature and humidity sensors, the company can provide information regarding conditions and automation, in order to program the system so that comfortable conditions can be maintained automatically. If tagged items are brought into these intelligent buildings, the solution could also provide asset tracking by identifying the locations of specific items.
Other devices could provide additional intelligence, such as RFID-enabled door or window sensors that identify when they are opened or closed. Such solutions are designed to be innovative and expandable, Manesh says. For example, RFID readers could initially be employed for temperature readings, and then be expanded over time to other applications. The goal, he reports, is "Taking an RFID or IoT deployment to the next level."
Dubai retailer Sharaf DG is utilizing Acceliot's RFID system with STAR readers installed above exit doors to create smart gates that capture each tagged product passing through the doorway. The system is also deployed at the retailer's distribution center, as well as in backrooms and store fronts. The system includes a point-of-sale reader to capture product tag IDs as they are purchased, thereby indicating those items have been sold.
Recently, Barriga says, Acceliot added features to STARflex, its four- to 48-port expandable reader system. Those new features include reader functionality for autonomous sensor handling. The system offers added user-management capability, along with improve security and encryption capabilities, enabling users and solution providers to innovate the IoT system for their specific use case. "We encourage innovation through our partner channels. Some partners have been developing their own proprietary implementations with our offering," Barriga says. "We are building STARflex to be a generic reader platform that allows users and partners to innovate."
"We believe the RFID market still is in its growing years," Manesh states. As IoT demands and solutions to meet those demands grow, he adds, there's a need for collaboration among RFID suppliers. "Because we are a one-stop shop for our client, we are a digital transformation advisor. If they want GPS, if they need BLE, we make that part of our solution."
Acceliot has expanded its edge platform capability to include most third-party readers to accommodate companies with mixed reader environments, Barriga says. The company uses machine learning to develop algorithms that differentiate between stationary and moving RFID tags, he adds. "RFID has already proven itself indispensable in several key industries," Manesh states, "and as it matures, I am certain other industries will follow."
