How to Deploy Indoor Asset Tracking without Infrastructure Using Crowdsourcing

Indoor asset tracking allows companies and businesses to track their physical assets inside buildings. Knowing where important tools and portable workstations are located lets organizations maximize operational efficiency and response time. The less time staff spend looking for a tool they need means more time being productive.

The majority of indoor asset tracking systems leverage Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technologies, while others may use RFID and Wi-Fi. Each physical asset is given a unique BLE or UWB tracker chip, called tags. Once the tag is within the range of a network or nearby smartphone, the tracker transmits data identifying its current location to the asset tracking system.

Wear and Tear with Hardware

Many indoor asset tracking systems use physical hardware sensors (also known as anchor points or gateways), placed in high-traffic areas, like main entryways, to locate tracker chips. These sensors, while effective, are expensive and require continuous maintenance. As such, placing them by every doorway in a building to provide real-time, accurate tracking is simply not ideal for many organizations and businesses that need to be budget-conscious, like hospitals and universities.

Indoor Asset Tracking with Oriient

Oriient is a software-only solution for tracking the indoor location of smartphones, based on Earth’s magnetic field. Oriient introduces a new method for tracking the location of assets inside the building: instead of installing sensors in each room, the existing smartphones of the staff going around the building will serve as the receivers of assets. A mobile app installed on the employee’s phone will seamlessly detect tags that are in proximity, and update the database on the asset’s last known location.

This is a very effective way to crowdsource the assets’ locations. Sounds familiar? This is the same concept used by AirTags by Apple or SmartThings by Samsung but at a fraction of the cost and a dedicated, private solution only for the facility owner/operator.

Oriient’s IndoorGPS is compatible with both BLE and UWB tags. All assets equipped with tags can be continuously traced within an Oriiented space. In addition, you give employees the power of indoor navigation, so they can also find the items and tools with greater ease.

In this video, our team demonstrates Oriient’s asset-tracking capability by first moving coffee beans far away from the coffee machine and then navigating to the coffee beans using Oriient’s IndoorGPS solution.

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