At last week’s Internet of Things World Forum, Dave Etherington, chief strategy officer at Titan (a company that sells advertising space in public spaces, such as transit terminals), Kevin Hunter, COO of Bluetooth beacon manufacturer Gimbal, and Peter Rivera, executive creative director for digital strategy and design firm Infusion, offered a range of use cases focused on engaging consumers through beacon-enabled smartphone applications.
But then an attendee posed a question: “The return on investment for deploying beacons in the supply chain, for doing things such as tracking assets… I would think [beacons] would be perfect for that,” he said. “Why is everyone focusing on consumer applications?”
That’s when moderator Euro Beinat, VP of platform technologies at Zebra Technologies, lit up. His company (which is emerging as one of the world’s largest RFID technology providers through its acquisition of Motorola Solutions’ enterprise business) is working to advance beacon deployments in business settings. Beacon manufacturers are increasingly integrating a variety of sensors for measuring temperature and things into their beacons, making the devices suitable for a number of supply chain applications. A transportation company, for example, could employ beacons mounted inside trucks used to move perishable products. If temperature readings inside the cargo space were to reach a dangerous level, the beacon could transit an alert to the driver’s mobile device.
Late last year, Zebra announced Zatar, an Internet of Things platform designed to enable companies to manage RFID readers and other devices remotely. At the IoT World Forum, Zebra demonstrated a number of ways in which Zatar could serve enterprise customers, such as by enabling wine sellers to monitor the conditions of its products through a combination of RFID tags tracking individual bottles, as well as beacons with integrated temperature and humidity trackers to ensure optimal environmental conditions.
During a keynote address, Phillip Gerskovich, Zebra’s senior VP of new growth platforms, said beacons represent a means for companies to leverage IoT technology with a low bar for entry and quick payoff.
“I think, in some cases, IoT has been conveyed to be too complicated,” Gerskovich said, pointing to beacons as a way to get up and running quickly.
Zebra is also currently engaged in a pilot in the health-care industry. While Gerskovich told IOT Journal that he could not reveal any partners in the project, he said the focus is to quantify emergency services. When the participating health-care provider dispatches an ambulance to collect a patient who has suffered cardiac arrest, that individual is issued a wristband with an embedded Bluetooth beacon, which transmits its unique identifier to a gateway mounted inside the ambulance. That gateway collects timestamps to track how much time elapses from the start of the trip to the ambulance’s arrival at a hospital. Inside the hospital, from the emergency room to operating bays, additional gateways collect the beacon ID, and software compiles a profile detailing the timeline of treatment.
The health-care facility involved in the pilot hopes to better understand how much time it takes to process emergency patients requiring timely treatment. Using beacons, it is looking to identify bottlenecks in its emergencies services so that it might improve its response time.
While some consumers have responded negatively to the use or even presence of beacons, Gerskovich said that during the pilot, “We’ve found that when patients ask about the purpose of their wristbands and we say that it helps them being [tracked through the emergency response system], they start waving the bracelet in front of the reader to make sure it’s being read. Mind you, these people are having heart attacks,” but they instantly see the application’s value.
This, Gerskovich added, reinforces the idea that consumers will embrace beacon technology if they can clearly see how they can benefit from it.
In the enterprise realm, beacons are not completely unknown—in fact, Hunter said, Gimbal supplies its beacons to a company (which he could not name) that uses them to track the locations of pallets within its warehouses. And earlier this year, labor-management software provider TimeForge rolled out a beacon-based system to help companies view where their personnel and key assets are located. But Zebra Technologies is gunning for wider deployment of beacons in business settings.