Safety & Security: Wi-Fi to the Rescue...

Have you ever wondered where high value assets are located in your facility or on your campus? Especially those that are mobile assets. Have you ever wondered who and where visitors to your offices are located at any given time? Now Ekahau is making the answers to these and other questions much easier and at a more rapid response. Safety, production costs, and time-to-market are vital points of consideration for industries such as oil refineries, chemical factories and other process-industry facilities. By being able to easily track people, vehicles, and assets, these factors can be made substantially more efficient.

Founded in 2000, Ekahau is the recognized leader in location-enabling enterprise Wi-Fi networks. Ekahau's mission is to provide the easiest, most cost effective and accurate positioning solutions for locating people, assets, inventory and other objects using wireless enterprise networks. The Ekahau solution tracks wireless laptops, PDAs, VOIP phones, Wi-Fi tags and other 802.11 enabled devices.

Ekahau’s solution allows businesses to keep track of valuable assets and equipment, improve the overall workflow, and improve the levels of corporate security and customer service. With Ekahau, the critical corporate resources, people and assets, will be always available at the right place and at the right time. As Ekahau's location tracking solution does not require installation of proprietary wireless infrastructure, but can be done individually over the private Wi-Fi network, the deployment cost is kept in minimum, and the overall system payback time is the fastest possible.

Safety and security applications are numerous especially in healthcare:

• Emergency management - more efficient and faster emergency response
• Patient monitoring - better patient safety and increased throughput
• Workflow management - better staff utilization and increased patient throughput
• Equipment management - reduced need for inventory
• Information delivery - improved workflow, reduced errors
• Billing support & verification - improved revenue capture

We can think of other homeland security and first responder applications using the Ekahau capabilities especially in post event incident management and key personnel tracking inside a closed perimeter. As WiMax and other 802.11 networks are deployed in major metro locations, the applications become wide spread.