Room-level Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) are critical in hospitals because they enable precise workflow automation, improving patient care, safety, and operational efficiency. If you only have approximate locations (e.g., “somewhere on this floor” “15 or 30 feet”), you lose the ability to automate tasks such as nurse call response, automated check-ins/outs, inventory tracking (knowing exactly which device is in which room), or infection-control workflows. A CTO looking to modernize hospital operations must ensure the location data is both reliable (no false positives) and quick (low latency), or the entire digital workflow can break down.
RF-based technologies like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth use signal strength (RSSI) or Angle of Arrival (AoA) to estimate location. While these methods can work for approximate indoor positioning (e.g., which general area or corridor someone is in), they face challenges providing deterministic room-level certainty. RF signals penetrate walls, reflect off surfaces, and can fluctuate based on environmental factors (like equipment, human traffic, furniture rearrangement). As a result, relying on RF alone often leads to “location jumps” or false positives that degrade real-time automation.
To achieve near-100% certainty under 10 seconds, a deterministic secondary signal is needed:
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Infrared (IR): Does not penetrate walls; highly directional.
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Ultrasound: Also contained by walls (not perfect, but better than RF at precise boundaries).
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Camera Vision: More complex and expensive, but also deterministic if line of sight is maintained.
By combining RF’s ubiquitous coverage (for communication and coarse positioning) with IR/Ultrasound/Camera’s determinism (to confirm room presence), hospitals get the best of both worlds:
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Room-level “proof” of presence (the deterministic component).
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Timely location updates (the RF component for quick data transfer and baseline positioning).
Bluetooth alone will always carry a risk of “spill-over” between rooms due to its signal propagation through walls or around corners—especially if the rooms share walls or are in close proximity. Even installing one BLE gateway per room attempts to localize, but you can still get:
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Signal Overlap: BLE signals can bleed into adjacent rooms.
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Environmental Interference: Machinery, walls with varying construction, and human presence can shift RSSI values.
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Latency vs. Accuracy Trade-Off: If the BLE system tries to improve accuracy by scanning multiple channels or waiting on advanced algorithms, you add delay.
Some vendors claim they can guarantee room-level certainty with a single BLE gateway in every room. In practice, the moment the real environment changes (e.g., staff crowding, furniture, new medical equipment), the system can and will misread which room the tag is in, eroding trust in the data. 3 false positives and nurses typically don’t trust and use the system anymore.
A “15 feet accuracy” radius is typical for standard BLE setups. While 15 feet might sound small in open areas, in a hospital it can easily span multiple rooms. For instance, in a setting where rooms are adjacent, 15 feet can mean you accidentally track a patient or piece of equipment as being in the neighboring room. That is unacceptable for clinical workflow automation because:
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Nurse Call Cancellation: The system must be certain which patient room a nurse has entered to accurately log and cancel nurse calls. A 15-foot margin might register the nurse in a neighboring room, causing incomplete or incorrect call cancellation.
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Patient Contact Time: Accurate contact tracing is impossible if the system confuses rooms, potentially misrepresenting which patients a nurse actually interacted with.
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Staff Safety: For staff duress or safety monitoring, a location “jump” can mean responders are directed to the wrong room in an emergency.
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Par Level Inventory: Real-time equipment and supply optimization (e.g., maintaining par levels) requires knowing exactly which room an asset is in, not just the general vicinity or adjacent room.
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Hand Hygiene Compliance: Automated tracking of hand hygiene events is rendered unreliable if the system thinks a clinician is in one room when they are actually in another.
Any “jump” between rooms triggers false alerts or misses critical events, undermining trust in the RTLS and negating the benefits of automation.
Kontakt.io’s Beam solution combines the openness and ubiquity of BLE with the deterministic advantages of IR to confirm room presence. Here’s why that matters:
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Room-Locked IR: IR signals do not pass through walls, so if a device “sees” the IR beacon, you know it is really inside that specific room.
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Low Latency, High Certainty: BLE provides quick data upload to the gateway (under 10s is easy to achieve), and IR ensures near 100% certainty of the exact room.
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Battery-Powered, Scalable Deployment: No need to wire for power or Ethernet in every room. This cuts down deployment time drastically, crucial for large hospital campuses with hundreds or thousands of rooms. Install the Beam device (which has both BLE + IR). The hardware is compact and battery-operated, so minimal disruption to hospital operations.
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Open BLE Ecosystem: Kontakt.io supports open BLE protocols, ensuring easy integration with existing hospital systems, devices, and future technologies. Standard protocols also protect against vendor lock-in and facilitate expansions or upgrades later.
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Fast to Install and Maintain: No complex calibrations needed. The IR boundary itself acts as the “calibration,” eliminating the guesswork and repeated site surveys required by purely RF-based solutions.
By combining these factors, Kontakt.io’s BLE + IR Beam solution provides scalable, fast, and deterministic location data—exactly what a CTO needs to ensure seamless workflow automation in critical healthcare environments.
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Room-level certainty is mandatory for reliable, automated hospital workflows.
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RF alone (BLE/Wi-Fi) inevitably suffers from interference and signal bleed, making it impossible to achieve 100% certainty.
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A hybrid approach (BLE + IR) ensures both scalability and deterministic “room lock” in clinical areas needed.
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Kontakt.io’s Beam Mini offers a plug-and-play, multi-year battery-powered solution that combines open BLE for real-time updates with IR for true room-level confirmation.
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This approach eliminates the problem of 15-foot accuracy “uncertainty,” ensuring no location “jumps” between rooms and boosting trust in the hospital’s automated workflows.