Indoor location services in health care — a missed opportunity?

Location services and GPS have made life a lot easier, from helping you find the bathroom in a sports stadium to navigating the great outdoors — it’s hard to imagine life without them.

But despite all the benefits, many of our indoor spaces still make little to no use of these tools. In a world increasingly filled with mobile and smart devices — with 357 million internet-connected devices forecasted in Australia by 2025 — that seems like a missed opportunity.

Historically, the problem with indoor wayfinding is that, put simply, GPS doesn’t work very well indoors, and methods for manually mapping are time-consuming. For the healthcare sector, and in particular the hospital system, this is compounded by large, multi-level campuses and moveable equipment.

On that note, let’s explore how indoor GPS is prescribing a new way forward for the healthcare industry.

The current state of indoor location services

As previously mentioned, a roaming GPS device struggles to work effectively indoors — largely because for it to work, it needs to be able to receive signals from the various satellites orbiting earth more than 20,000 km away. Combine this with the additional layers of concrete in a multi-level hospital and it is understandable why this can prove to be a bit of a stumbling block.

Because of this, indoor location-based applications have to use technologies like Bluetooth (which is typically on a completely separate overlay to Wi-Fi) to improve their accuracy. As a result, we have not seen the widespread adoption or a set of standardised applications for indoor locations, like we have for outdoor spaces.

Instead, indoor users have to manually map out the location of their access points (APs) — leaving the set-up prone to human error, and requiring further time and resources for recalibration whenever the location of an AP changes. Then, imagine how much time it would take to manually map somewhere like a hospital, which operates potentially thousands of APs.

Creating self-locating indoor access points through GPS

So how can we bring the ease and accuracy of outdoor GPS to indoor environments, and avoid any time-consuming and costly manual interference?

The answer lies in self-locating technology and GPS-enabled APs. Aruba has recently developed self-locating APs — using high-sensitivity GPS receivers that are embedded in and optimised for APs. This approach stemmed from the recognition that APs are generally static and have to communicate with other APs around them to ‘get a location for themselves’. 

By combining GPS with fine time measurements (FTM), which can orchestrate and coordinate the measurements between APs across the network, accuracy can be achieved to determine AP locations represented in both latitude, longitude and elevation. This means the true height of the AP is also calculated in the process. These GPS-enabled indoor APs can be located on ceilings, with their antennas facing the floor, and even in basements — traditionally the worst kind of environments for GPS solutions.

Integrating APs with GPS capabilities also means that they can automatically communicate with each other and algorithmically determine an optimal anchor point for all APs within the network. This process puts an end to any abstraction in location services and allows for a self-correction after the initial set-up. This is performed through repeated measurements and correction of anchor APs, providing businesses with the most accurate location possible.

Enhancing staff and patient experience

This becomes particularly beneficial for businesses and institutions that operate across one or more large premises. In hospitals for instance, GPS-enabled indoor APs allow asset tracking of expensive medical equipment including imaging devices and vital signs machines, so that they can be quickly located during emergencies.

For employees themselves, self-locating APs give IT teams a huge advantage. By successfully integrating GPS receivers into indoor APs, network administrators are not only able to better manage these APs in the long term, but also deliver improved indoor location services that make things like object tracking, people counting and heat mapping more accurate than ever.

To overcome the limitations of manual approaches, APs that use built-in GPS receivers, teamed with FTM, can help establish locations precisely and automatically. These self-locating APs create a foundation for accurate indoor location, presenting an endless stream of use cases across the healthcare industry.

Image credit: iStockphoto.com/Lemon_tm