Regardless of whether you’re considering indoor positioning technology for your hospital , warehouse, construction site, or correctional facility (or a business in any other industry), we highly recommend asking these four questions to help you select the best solution.
This is the first and arguably the most important question you should ask when weighing options for location technology. It’s simple to break down:
Before you jump to conclusions about which category you fit into, it’s worth pressure-testing your assumption. The only cases I’ve seen that need precision accuracy are operating in large, open-air spaces like warehouses. They need a system that is precise down to the foot (or even centimeter) since they have thousands of items on shelves. In this instance, room-level accuracy would be horrible, as the individual looking for an asset could still spend hours combing the area.
In operational settings (in hospitals, manufacturing, correctional facilities, etc.), you very likely only need to know the room-level accuracy. For example, if you’re primarily using indoor positioning technology to locate employees, you really don’t need to know what side of a room they’re on.
In short, you have to weigh the importance of granular data with the expense.
You need to consider several things when you’re calculating expense:
Readers are typically plugged in, so power consumption there isn’t a problem—but on the tag side, this can be problematic. For example, WiFi tags have to be large because they consume a lot of power.
One thing you may not realize about indoor positioning technologies is that some interfaces are overly complicated. We regularly hear that people thought they’d love all the bells and whistles of a particular RTLS technology during the demo but quickly found out they weren’t very easy to use.
So keep in mind the individuals who will be using the system regularly—there’s something to be said for simple user interface design. The manager may like the fancy location map, but the everyday user may just want to know where a particular shipment is.
We’re happy to discuss any additional questions you may have as you select your indoor positioning technology.