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Ekahau Refines Wi-Fi RTLS Performance With New Location Beacon

Posted on: Thursday, 26 March 2009, 04:15 CDT

RESTON, Virginia, March 26 /PRNewswire/ --

- Ekahau's Patented Wi-Fi Methodologies Now Exceed Performance Criteria Traditionally Only Available With Expensive Proprietary Technologies

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081014/324879-a )

Ekahau Inc., the leading provider of Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), announced that it will make available a family of a small mobile battery-powered transmitters, called Ekahau location beacons, to further increase the location accuracy of its award-winning Wi-Fi RTLS solution. These beacons are designed to enhance system performance in areas that have poor Wi-Fi coverage but where location accuracy is mission critical. Ekahau will be demonstrating its location beacon capabilities during the HIMSS 2009 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, April 4-8, 2009 (Booth 4820).

Ekahau is the recognized performance leader in the RTLS market with location algorithms that are capable of pinpointing tagged objects using existing enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networks. But in areas where there is marginal or poor wireless coverage, Ekahau location beacons can help improve location accuracy to levels previously available with expensive, proprietary systems not based on standard Wi-Fi technology. For a typical hospital environment, Ekahau location beacons can guarantee bed- and room-level accuracy in areas with poor Wi-Fi coverage, without the need to install additional Wi-Fi access points.

With deployment of these location beacons, the Ekahau RTLS can support a variety of different location tracking requirements, such as:

Ekahau Wi-Fi tags recognize these location beacon signals and transmit the signal data to the RTLS server, which calculates the precise location of the Ekahau tags. The location beacons are typically mounted on a wall. Because they do not require any cabling, the location beacons can be moved around as needed to improve accuracy for a period of time or installed permanently in specific locations.

"Based on evaluations of several systems on the market, we chose to work with Ekahau because its high performance Wi-Fi RTLS system was incredibly easy to install and operate," said Gerhard Kschwendt, senior director for ISM Siemens Medical Solutions, USA. "Ekahau has done it right again. As other systems keep adding more proprietary infrastructure to their offerings, Ekahau has stayed true to its vision of providing high-performance solutions over standard Wi-Fi networks."

Competing enterprise-class location tracking systems include ones using ultra-wideband, active RFID, ultrasound, ZigBee and other RF-based systems. These alternatives require installation of proprietary and single-purpose antennas, and dedicated staff to deploy, manage and maintain. Some of these technologies such as ZigBee and active RFID, are problematic in certain scenarios because they can introduce possible interference with Wi-Fi networks and critical patient care equipment. For example, 125 kHz chokepoints have been banned by many hospitals around the world because they can interfere with clinical equipment in hospitals and ZigBee (or IEEE 802.15.4) can seriously impact a customer's existing Wi-Fi network that is used for primary voice and data communications.

"Wi-Fi RTLS continues to dominate the market," said Pauli Misikangas, Ekahau's CTO. "Our innovative technological advances continue to strengthen our performance leadership, giving our customers accuracy levels that beat most proprietary systems and providing 100 percent service coverage across the enterprise. As the worldwide investment in Wi-Fi technology increases, we are able to leverage industrywide economies of scale not available to users of proprietary systems."

The Ekahau RTLS solution is designed to work over any generation or brand of Wi-Fi network. It is supported and endorsed by all major Wi-Fi vendors and has been certified with approximately 30 of the leading Wi-Fi network and device companies worldwide. In a study published in IEEE Computer Society's IT Professional magazine, Berlin Institute of Technology researchers ranked Ekahau as the best performing Wi-Fi RTLS solution on the market for the clinical healthcare use.

The location beacons are now available through Ekahau and its partners worldwide at a price of approximately $50 a piece.

About Ekahau Inc.

Ekahau Inc. is the industry leader in providing Wi-Fi-based RTLS solutions. Ekahau's RTLS technology is routinely recognized for its superior performance in customer benchmarking and competitive evaluations of Wi-Fi-based location tracking solutions. Ekahau's customers, including several Fortune 500 companies worldwide, are realizing the benefits of Wi-Fi based location services and innovative Wi-Fi network planning and optimization tools. Ekahau's solutions are being used in more than 150 hospitals around the world, as well as by manufacturers, mining/oil/gas companies, government agencies and the military. Ekahau partners include wireless software developers, leading system integrators and international OEM partners, who develop and market wireless enterprise applications. Ekahau is a U.S. based corporation, with offices in Saratoga, Calif.; Reston, Va.; Helsinki, Finland; and Hong Kong, China. For more information about Ekahau, please visit at http://www.ekahau.com.

(c) Copyright 2009, Ekahau, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SOURCE Ekahau Inc.

Source: PR Newswire

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