Education: How to Monitor Device Location to Keep Things Running Smoothly
19/01/2022
Learning environments are hectic from the very first class to the last. You have a mixture of students, staff, and visitors coming and going on a regular basis. From a safety and productivity point of view, knowing your staff are in the right place at the right time can be a tricky task to get right.
So, today – in our latest Education Pain Points blog - we’re going to discuss the use of indoor and outdoor positioning – solutions that allow you to track the location of your two-way radio devices, helping you to react to events in real-time and allocate tasks in a smarter way.
Indoor positioning
We’ll start off with indoor positioning and explain how it works and how it benefits you as an educational facility.
In scenarios where it’s beneficial to know where your radio users are inside your building, indoor positioning makes monitoring their location as easy as 1,2,3.
With the use of Bluetooth beacons – that are strategically placed inside your building space – you can track the location of your two-way radio devices in real-time, giving you access to a range of benefits. These include:
- Locating somebody’s whereabouts quickly
- Allocating a task to someone in close proximity to where work needs to be completed
- Responding to everyday or emergency situations in a timely fashion
- Having peace of mind that your workforce is safe on the job
- Benefitting from real-time device location updates
This solution is ideal for facilities and maintenance teams who spend their day in different locations across your site and would benefit from quick, reliable communication with their counterparts – utilising real-time data in the process.
What are Bluetooth beacons?
Bluetooth beacons are small devices that emit signals to Bluetooth-compatible devices (in this case a digital two-way radio) and the radio picks up these signals.
Placing them across your building space (next to certain facilities for example) will allow you to see where your radios are in terms of proximity to the beacons, giving you an accurate overview of where people are and when.
They tend to be inexpensive and use low amounts of energy, so they won’t break the bank when it comes to implementing them.
Outdoor positioning
Now we move onto outdoor positioning, where it’s what’s on the outside (of your indoor space) that counts.
Outdoor positioning, as it suggests on the tin, helps you keep track of device location in your outside areas. This is achieved by using GPS signal and geofences – a solution that allows you to create pre-defined geographical areas that cover your outside spaces – to work out when someone is in the right location.
You can also set up alerts to be triggered to a dispatch system or another radio device when an end user enters a geofenced area, making it easier to contact them at important times throughout the day.
What is a geofence?
A geofence is a virtual parameter that is used to map out a real-world geographical area. This virtual boundary makes a separation between an area you want to track and the space around it that you don’t wish to track.
This can be used to know when one of your facilities and maintenance team is entering an area where they need to repair something within the geofence, and when they exit the perimeter.
Two solutions, one interface
Digital radios have become a go-to solution in the Education sector. Part of this is down to the fact that two-way radios have a range of smart features and software that offer seamless and reliable voice and data capabilities.
If you were to use indoor and outdoor positioning, your radios would automatically switch from pairing with Bluetooth beacons to GPS monitoring, giving you a seamless solution that works every time your end users walk through the door and back out of it.
From an interface perspective, you need just one dispatch control system (desktop device) to monitor both indoor and outdoor positioning. When end users are indoors, you’ll be able to see their location on a detailed floor plan, and when they’re outside, you’ll be able to see their location on open street maps.
Book a FREE Demonstration
This article provides a snapshot of what indoor and outdoor positioning is, and the benefits it can have for your facility.
If you want to find out more about indoor and outdoor positioning in more detail, then book a FREE demonstration of our award-winning TRBOCALL system and we’ll show you how indoor and outdoor positioning works and how it will benefit your facility going forward.
Complete our online enquiry form, via our contact us page, and we’ll arrange a demonstration at a time that suits you.
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