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Tracking wheelchairs and pumps in a clinic: BLE, UWB or RFID? How does room info appear in Hermetry?

Tracking wheelchairs and pumps in a clinic: BLE, UWB or RFID? How does room info appear in Hermetry?

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

Hi, I’m confused and don’t know if I can put this together.I’m running a voluntary pilot with the technical team of a healthcare organization I know. The problem: wheelchairs, infusion pumps, and two portable ultrasound devices keep disappearing, and nurses spend 20-30 minutes every shift looking for them. 12-15 rooms per floor, 4 floors. Meter-level accuracy isn’t needed, “3rd floor, room 314” is enough.The more I read, the more options came up: BLE tags with fixed receivers, UWB, passive RFID door readers, and some people talk about location using Wi-Fi RSSI. The building already has a Wi-Fi infrastructure.Second part: I’m thinking of putting floors and rooms into the Sites & Assets tree in Hermetry (Main building > Block A > 3rd Floor > 314). But does Hermetry calculate which room a tag is in by itself, or do I have to send it? Should I make each tag a device? I came across a ready-made solution for personnel tracking but I didn’t fully understand it.

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

I tried Wi-Fi RSSI at home, and even a phone jumps from room to room, so I think you shouldn’t go there at all.

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

I am also a facilities manager in the healthcare sector. We tested a passive RFID door reader here, and the stretcher was not read when it passed through the door quickly. Also, a reader on every door is very expensive. Just noting it for reference.

Modbus sadece register'dır, ta ki olmayana kadar.
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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

Doesn’t Hermetry find the room itself from the tag’s RSSI? I thought the Map card would do something for that.

Sahadan selamlar.
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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

It doesn’t, Ilgaz. This is also where I went wrong on my first project. Hermetry does not calculate zones from position or from BLE beacons, and there is no geofence polygon. The tag, or the gateway that hears it, decides the room itself and sends the zone name. The ready-made staff tracking solution is built exactly this way: the zone key is either a zone name or outside.For your scale, my suggestion is BLE. UWB is for sub-metre accuracy; at room level it doesn’t pay off. The setup works like this:

  1. One fixed BLE receiver per room (an ESP32 is enough, plugged into a socket). All of them send the RSSI of the tags to a local server or a Pi.
  2. For each tag, the Pi picks the room that heard it strongest in the last 10-15 seconds, and adds hysteresis (don’t switch to a new room unless it is at least 6 dB stronger), otherwise the chair at the door will jump between two rooms.
  3. The Pi connects as a gateway and reports each tag as a child device:
v1/gw/telemetry
{
  "pompa-07":   {"values": {"zone": "A-3-314", "zone_id": 3314, "battery": 81}},
  "sandalye-12": {"values": {"zone": "A-2-208", "zone_id": 2208, "battery": 64}}
}

I added zone_id on purpose: zone is text, and text keys don’t keep a chart history, only the last value is shown. For the question “where was the pump yesterday” you need a numeric code.On the Sites & Assets side, create the rooms with kind Room or with your own ZONE type, and keep their codes the same as the names the gateway sends. For the tree dashboard and lists, the matching is again done by the gateway.The ready-made solution’s page describes the model very well, you can adapt from there: Personel takibi.

Kayıtta yoksa olmamıştır.
Accepted solution♥ 1

Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

When installing BLE receivers in a healthcare facility, talk to the medical device department (biomedical), as at our pharmaceutical plant they required separate approval to add a 2.4 GHz device.

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Translated from Türkçe by AI ·

Esra, thanks a lot, you pointed to exactly the spot I was stuck on. I thought Hermetry would figure out the room by itself, so I was planning to send RSSI keys for it, for nothing. On the Pi I tried the strongest room + 6 dB hysteresis, we tested for two days on the 3rd floor, and the chairs don’t jump around anymore. The zone_id suggestion also worked well, the head nurse asked on the first day “where was it yesterday” 🙂 We also asked for biomedical approval from the start, as Furkan said.

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