What are the key asset tracking challenges faced by hospitals?
How is WiFi used inside of mines?
What are the advantages of using WiFi for RFID?
What’s the difference between RTLS and RFID?
Should you save your WiFi band for other purposes?

Photo : Tuomo Rutanen holding an Ekahau tag at RFID Journal Live! 2007 in Orlando Florida

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Show Notes (below)

Interview summary

Tuomo Rutanen, vice-president business development with Ekahau, explains how his company provides value for asset tracking.

So how do you justify an ROI with an Ekahau system?
• By locating equipment for maintenance
• By getting higher rates of utilisation thereby reducing future replacement purchases
• By reducing infrastructure costs because you’re using the WiFi network already in place.
• By acquiring real-time production statistics.

 

Links to topics discussed in the podcast:

Academia RFID

RFID Journal Live! 2007 conference content (password required)

300 000$ asset tracking ROI for infusion pumps at Wayne Memorial hospital

CVRD Inco Mines Turns to Ekahau to Track Assets, Productivity

 

Definitions of terms mentioned in the podcast

Passive RFID tags : Not equipped with a battery. They are activated by a reader. See episode #1 “What is RFID Technology?” for additional information.

Active RFID tags : Equipped with a battery which amplifies the signal transmitted back to the reader. See episode #1 “What is RFID Technology?” for additional information.

Passive HF RFID : High Frequency passive tags have a very short read range. See episode #3 “RFID Printing and Encoding Solutions for UHF and HF Tags” for additional information.

Active UHF RFID : Active Ultra-High Frequency tags have much longer ranges than passive HF tags. See episode #3 “RFID Printing and Encoding Solutions for UHF and HF Tags” for additional information.

RTLS : Real Time Location (Tracking) System

VLAN : Stands for “Virtual Local Area Network”. It is a method of creating logical partitions in a network. Here’s a link that explains how to create a VLAN on a Cisco switch.

Access controllers and switches : Some of the equipment used to manage a network.

WiFi 802.11BG and WiFi 802.11A : Wireless communication standards set by IEEE. You can download them here.

 

Additional reading

Is WiFi RFID?

WiFi RFID seems to be a booming market
100 per cent annual growth through to 2010. The study is available here (registration is required)

Combining WiFi and RFID to get an RTLS system

RTLS and RFID fight it out for the hospital sector

Tuomo Rutanen presents some advantages and ROI for hospitals in another interview

2,400 infusion pumps tracked at Emory Healthcare

These Ekahau tags have two way communications for remote tag management

Siemens Communications announced a worldwide reseller and integration agreement with Ekahau Inc.

Beam me up, Scotty!
“Two-way communication badges for enterprise, campuses”… for trekkies like me who grew up on Star Trek, I can’t wait to use one of these tags and say “Computer, please locate Captain Picard.” – How cool would that be?

 

Interview transcript

Harold (1:17):
This is Harold Boeck from RFIDRadio at RFID live in Orlando, Florida. Walking into the exhibitor’s section, the first booth that we meet is Ekahau. So they have a really great position here at the event and right now I’m with Tuomo Rutanen, the vice-president business development with Ekahau.

Tuomo :
Good morning.

Harold (1:39):
First of all Tuomo, I would like to ask you to tell us little about that your company, some of the applications that you’re doing. We’re hearing more and more about what Ekahau is doing around the WiFi space. I will also to the end of this interview to tell us a little more about the advantages and disadvantages of using RFID in the WiFi band. So first of all, Ekahau, could you tell us where that name comes because it’s not a name that you would hear too often…

Tuomo:
Ekahau is basically the Mayan god that protects merchants and travelers and by protecting them, Ekahau knows where they. Hence we are basically location technology company so the name really ties into the core of what we do today.

Harold (2:24):
Could you give us some examples as some of the applications that you do?

Tuomo:
Absolutely. So what we have is we basically have a location tracking system that can track the location of people, assets, work in progress, inventory… pretty much anything you want to track the location of in real-time in a building, a factory, a large campus environment or even across multiple campuses. The basis of how we do this is that we work over the customer’s existing WiFi network without having to add anything else to that infrastructure. So the customer has WiFi network in place, they need our software and our tags and they can go off and start tracking things easily pretty quickly anywhere through that capture facility where they have coverage.

Harold (3:05):
I first heard about Ekahau concerning hospital applications doing asset tracking. Could you tell us a little about what to do around that?

Tuomo:
Now the typical hospital, as you know, if you walk into hospital, is relatively chaotic. You’ve got people moving around, you’ve got equipment moving around. Everything in hospitals is actually mobile maybe except the curtains and wallpaper. With that said, any given hospital will have millions, tens of millions or in some instances, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment moving around, rolling around.

Key challenges that they face, 1- is the maintenance of this equipment. An infusion pump in a hospital that is passed its maintenance date, might not be working correctly. The maintenance people need to find it to maintain on a regular schedule. If they can’t find it, they can’t maintain it. You’ve got a problem. This applies to a wide variety of hospital equipment.

The other another problem is that a lot of hospitals have to overbuy a lot of equipment because again it’s on wheels so they can’t find it, they can’t located it. So you may have a 500 bed hospital in hospital with 900 fusion pumps. Well they don’t really need that much, but because these things again are mobile, they have to overbuy or buy and lease on top of that during peak demand. Which is basically money thrown away. So with a location tracking system, when we tag all the assets, we can basically make them available to the maintenance personnel, to the floor nurse, to the staff who need to find, locate and use that equipment. And basically make sure the system helps, make sure that they’re properly maintained and that the hospitals are getting a high rate of utilization. Those factors combined can provide a very quick ROI for s system like Ekahau.

Harold (4:48):
You just gave some hospital managers some great ideas for return on investment and maximizing the asset utilization. I know there’s a great case study in RFID Journal around infusion pumps and asset tracking where basically they save 300 000 $ by just not buying as many infusion pumps because they’re using the ones that they have already much more efficiently. Now I know that Ekahau recently also a signed a contract, I think this is public, in the mining sector. Could you tell us a little more about that?

Tuomo :
That’s right. Yesterday we announced CVRD INCO in Canada, one of the largest mining companies in the world as a customer. Essentially, what they are doing is a couple things. 1- they’ve been deploying WiFi in the mines because mining companies increasingly need communications inside the mines to relay data up to the surface of the mobile computers and things like that as well as voice communications. With that infrastructure already being in place in the mines, it’s a natural fit for Ekahau to provide a tracking system. And so the couple things they’re doing, one that we started out initially, is the ability for them to track assets inside the mines: production vehicles, tools, things that are in there and several kilometers underground in a mine shafts when it’s dark. You can imagine how problematic it might be asked to find things. A lot of this equipment is very very expensive and can also be underutilized. So we’re helping to locate it and make better use of it. But also, by monitoring for example, the trucks that bring the ore up to the surface of the ground, you can start getting production statistics because you know how much ore a truck can carry when it brings it to the surface. Then by counting the number of trips or runs the truck makes, you can actually start seeing your productivity and monitoring your productivity. The second thing that’s going to happen a little bit later, but nevertheless is part of the overall project, is that at Ekahau, once the system is in, we have the ability to basically track anything for a variety of applications or use cases. In the mining industry, specifically in North American, there’s a very very heavy push also from the regulatory side to provide a system that would basically help out people underground in case of emergency or disaster situations. So imagine for example a mine caving in or an explosion or a blast or something and you’ve got people who are injured underground. You don’t necessarily know where they are. The lights go out and smog and things like that… so with a real-time location system, at the time of impact, you can get a full situation awareness of where everything and everybody is at the time of the accident / incident. That way you can better pinpoint rescue operations. Target your rescuers to go where people actually are versus searching blindly in miles and miles or kilometers and kilometers of mine shafts underground.

Harold (7:29):
Wow, that’s really a great application. That’s the type of application you wish every mine would be using around the world just for the safety of the workers. Now, in the RFID universe we’ve been hearing a lot about the High-Frequency (HF) band for short range identification and for long-range identification we been hearing more about the active UHF tags around the 900 MHz or 433 MHz. I’d like you to tell us what would be the advantages of using the WiFi band which is at the 2.4 GHz.

Tuomo:
Okay, it’s actually exactly pretty simple. If you look at Ekahau and what we offer today it’s really technically a real-time location system and, sort of I guess, part of the overall RFID umbrella. This is where some confusion is in the market. People look at RFID and think it can solve everything. RFID in itself, if you look at the passive RFID as the name implies, is Radio Frequency Identification technology. It is not really a locating technology because as an item passes through a stationary reader, you know that it was at the reader. If it goes through a warehouse door, into the warehouse, unless you have readers every 10 feet, you don’t know where inside the warehouse that passive tag is. Conversely, active RFID systems, as you mentioned in the 900, 433 MHz bands, are there are some other ones out there too, typically employ some type of radio sensor, antennas, things like that, that you basically build out into an environment and with these sensors, the system provider provides tags and the sensors can sense the tags using varying methodologies to pinpoint the location of these tags. Now the idea on both of these technologies is you’re building infrastructure to actually know and see where your tags are. With a 2.4 GHz where Ekahau and RTLS comes in, is basically the idea is that you have a WiFi network in place. You’re going to need a WiFi network regardless of the technology you deploy. If you use passive RFID with handheld computers, you need a WiFi network to be able to interrogate the tags. So what we like to say is if you’ve got the WiFi networks, stop building there, don’t build anything else. You can use the 2.4 GHz WiFi tags on that network and basically pinpoint the location very precisely without making that incremental investment in that infrastructure which typically is proprietary.

Harold (9:46):
At the time we’re hearing some end-users – not to mention anyone in particular – but in the hospital industry, we’ve heard a presentation yesterday of somebody saying that they wanted to reserve their WiFi band for the medical equipment and not use it for RFID. What would be your comments regarding that?

Tuomo:
I guess in some instances people are not necessarily well educated on how a WiFi RTLS system works. We have many hospitals around the world using our systems and want they’ve basically done is they’ve created what’s called of the VLAN in their network – a Virtual LAN in their WiFi network that is dedicated to the RTLS. Through proper network management, proper control procedures on their access controllers and switches, they’re able to prioritize traffic. If it is a lifeline application that needs to get priority over everything else, this is all very doable on a relatively modern WiFi network where those applications could get priority over, for example, RTLS or other things. When we’re talking about 802.11BG, now there’s also a standard called 802.11A which is basically at a higher frequency band, more cells, which is also getting a lot of popularity right now because you’ve got increased bandwidth available to the customers to use. For example, one of the big things being talked about is voice over WiFi being used or being pushed out to the “A” band because of the intensive capacity requirements. What I’m trying to say is that it’s is very doable to have RTLS running on a WiFi network with a variety of other applications and basically it’s very easy to manage that at the network level itself to determine which applications get priority usage or not. Also the thing to note is that the RTLS systems really don’t send a lot of data. A typical Ekahau tag might send 60 bytes of data per location request and it will only do this on a sort of on-demand basis. So there’s really not a whole lot of traffic going on the network or any kind of capacity being consumed on the network. The way it runs is it’s in the background. You hardly even noticed it.

Harold (11:50)
That’s really interesting. Thank you so much for those explanations Tuomo Rutanen, vice-president business development at Ekahau.

Tuomo:
Thank you Harold. It was a pleasure talking to you.

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