In today’s dynamic healthcare environments, ensuring the safety and security of staff and patients is paramount. Kontakt.io’s Staff Safe solution, one of many applications within the Kontakt.io platform, leverages its AI-enabled Real-time Location System (RTLS) to enhance people safety. It provides a discreet alerting system and rapid incident response to support an organization’s duress protocols.
Why Kontakt.io?
A fast-to-deploy, easy-to-use, and scalable cloud platform
Fast time to deployment: Implement safety measures quickly with minimal disruptions using Kontakt.io’s cloud-based infrastructure. Our team of experts ensures swift installation and integration into your existing environment.
Easy to use: Intuitive and seamless operation for both staff and responders, requiring minimal training and support.
Scalable: Easily expand coverage and functionality as your needs grow. The modular infrastructure ensures scalability by leveraging existing BLE-enabled Wi-Fi infrastructure.
The platform advantage
One badge, many use cases
The same Smart Badge used for staff safety duress alerts can also serve multiple other needs across your operations, such as:
Asset tracking: Find and locate equipment closest to you, ensuring quick access to necessary tools and improving operational efficiency.
Nurse call cancellation: Automate nurse call alert cancellation when entering the patient room, saving time and reducing alert fatigue among staff.
Hand hygiene compliance: Automate staff hand hygiene activities to improve infection control.
Patient credential display: When entering a room, automatically show staff credentials on a patient display or TV screen, enhancing transparency and patient trust.
Other use cases: Expand the badge's functionality to cover additional applications, such as patient flow and resource orchestration.
Infrastructure modularity: 100% room-level certainty with Portal Beams and Beam Minis
The Staff Safe solution leverages Portal Beams and Beam Minis for 99% room-level certainty at low latency (< 10 seconds). Unlike Bluetooth-only location systems that provide only pod or zone-level accuracy, Kontakt.io’s modular infrastructure allows you to deploy beams only where needed, providing precise location data when it matters most, ensuring quick and accurate responses in duress situations.
Integrate with existing IT infrastructure and systems
The Staff Safe solution seamlessly integrates with various existing systems to enhance its functionality and fit into your organization’s technology landscape. These existing integrations include:
Wi-Fi Access Points: Leverage providers, like Cisco Spaces, to extend BLE connectivity using your current network infrastructure.
Emergency Notification Systems: Integrate with leading platforms, such as Singlewire and Spok, to streamline and automate emergency notifications.
Nurse Call Cancellation Systems: Integrate with systems, such as Rauland Borg and Hillrom, to allow staff to cancel alerts quickly and efficiently.
EHRs: Connect with your existing EHR systems to ensure a comprehensive, integrated approach to staff and patient safety.
The benefits and features
Staff feel valued and safe: When staff encounter an emergency, they can discreetly press a button on their Smart Badge to call for help. This activates an alert and notifies responders of their real-time location.
Empowered responders: Responders receive detailed alert notifications, including the staff's real-tlme location, enabling swift and effective interventions.
Room-level certainty: Thanks to the modular Portal Beam or Beam Mini, responders can be dispatched precisely to the room where help is needed, providing room-level location accuracy in critical moments.
Alert status awareness: Alerts go through various statuses from activation to resolution, ensuring complete visibility into the current status of all incidents.
Alert metrics and insights: Gain actionable insights from comprehensive alert metrics to optimize safety protocols.
Alert Webhooks: Instantly send alerts to designated third-party systems for seamless integration.
Role-based permissions: Control access based on user roles, ensuring secure and tailored use of the system.
The components: a connected framework of IoT devices and apps
The Staff Safe framework consists of IoT tag and Infrastructure devices and the Kio Cloud platform, providing a robust, reliable solution for staff safety.
The following illustration highlights the framework and architecture.
The physical world
IoT devices deployed to support the Staff Safe solution.
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Tags: the moving devices
Smart Badges: These are wearable devices worn by people for staff duress alerts and location awareness. Badges continuously broadcast data via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and empower staff with instantaneous alert activation from two easy-access buttons.
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Infrastructure devices: the stationary devices
BLE-enabled Access Points: These devices leverage the Wi-Fi network you already have in place, such as Cisco Catalyst 9100s Access Points and Cisco Spaces, to enhance BLE connectivity and optimize deployment without the need for additional infrastructure.
Portal Lights (BLE to Wi-Fi Gateway): These devices aggregate data from Kontakt.io BLE devices and send the data to Kio Cloud over the Wi-Fi network. They also provide the over-the-air (OTA) device firmware and configuration updates for BLE-only Infrastructure and Tag devices.
Portal Beam/Beam Mini: Adds room-level certainty with its built-in IR transmitter, ensuring precise location accuracy.
The Kio Cloud
The Kio Cloud is a suite of apps for managing Kontakt.io IoT devices, location topology, user access, and the Kio Apps shared components.
AI Location Engine: Computes accurate, room-level data for Kontakt.io's RTLS, occupancy, and indoor navigation solutions.
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Smart Location: Mapping of the physical locations where Kontakt.io solutions and IoT devices are deployed.
Smart Location consists of the following:
Location topology: A hierarchical mapping consisting of campuses, buildings, floors along with digital floor plans, and rooms. Used by the AI Location engine to compute accurate, room-level data for Kontakt.io's RTLS, occupancy, and indoor navigation solutions.
Departments: Group rooms for use across the Kio Apps.
Spaces: Group rooms or seats for use with the Kio Workspace Insights app and the Kontakt.io Portal Beam.
Footfall: Locations that identify the floors where people footfall traffic is measured by a Kontakt.io Portal Beam. For use with the Kio Workspace Insights app.
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Company Settings: Kio Apps shared components.
Three core features:
- Entity Management: The Entity Types (staff roles) and Entities (staff).
- Room Management: Room Types and Room Matching, which work together to set the status of staff by room. Room Types categorize the areas within your facility, such as Clean Storage or Patient Room, and each Room Type can define Entity Type Rules by Staff Role that determine the status staff take when they enter a matching room. Room Matching associates each Smart Location room with a Room Type, so the system knows which room-level rules to apply as staff move from one room to another.
- Webhooks: Send a triggered alert to a third-party system. A webhook defines the destination URL, the payload, the headers, and which apps are allowed to use it. Webhooks are created in Company Settings and then assigned to an Alert Rule in a Kio App, alongside the other notification methods — a webhook is never sent on its own.
Entity Manager: A companion to Company Settings that is limited to Entity Management (staff).
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Users: Manage who can sign in to the Kontakt.io platform and what each person can do, using role-based access control (RBAC). Three core features:
- User Management: Add and maintain user profiles, assign roles and campus access, and control sign-in — passwords, multi-factor authentication, and enabling, disabling, or deleting a user.
- Groups: Apply the same roles and campus access to many users at once instead of user by user. Managed Groups are maintained here; SSO Groups sync from your identity provider and are view-only.
- Integration API: Create and manage integration API clients — non-human accounts that let a third-party system connect to Kio Cloud. A client signs in with a client ID and secret rather than an email and password, and is assigned API roles rather than human-user roles.
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Device Management: Manage Kontakt.io IoT devices.
This includes claiming Kontakt.io orders, managing device settings, getting insights into device inventory, and keeping devices up-to-date with the latest firmware.
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Device Health: Monitor the health of Kontakt.io IoT devices.
Get alerts when devices may need attention. The alerting features include alert types, optional alert delivery mediums, and elective monitoring of devices by specific devices, device types, or by locations.
The Kio mobile apps
Kio Setup Manager: A mobile app used to install Kontakt.io infrastructure devices, including the Portal Light, Portal Beam, and Beam Mini. It also offers device troubleshooting capabilities.
Kio Staff Safe Alerts (available for the iPhone and iPad): A mobile version of the Staff Safe web app "Simple View". This app provides responders with access to active alerts at their selected location, as well as the ability to acknowledge and resolve alerts.
Kio Entity Manager: A mobile companion to the Kio Entity Manager web app, providing users a method to assign Smart Badges to staff.
Kio Proximity: A mobile app that locates nearby Kontakt.io BLE Tag devices commonly attached to tracked assets or worn by people. Using Bluetooth signal strength (RSSI), it determines the proximity of Tags to your real-time location. The app is especially useful for locating Tags that may be out of range of a Portal Light or other BLE-to-Wi-Fi gateway device.
Staff Safe concepts and terminology
Staff Safe is designed for scalability and ease of use while providing a comprehensive tool for administrators, stakeholders, and personnel responsible for responding to staff duress incidents.
For definitions of the terms used throughout the app — staff, Staff Roles, Staff Groups, Alert Rules, button events, alert statuses, and the rest — see Staff Safe terminology.
For how staff activate an alert and what happens next, see About staff duress alerts. For who can sign in and what each role has access to, see About user access to Staff Safe.