Guardly Releases Industry-first Integrated Indoor Positioning System

Guardly today announced the launch of its Indoor Positioning System (IPS), the industry's first mobile safety solution that offers integrated indoor location detection capabilities. Guardly IPS further enhances Guardly's existing mobile safety solutions for the enterprise by transmitting the building, floor and specific room of a mobile emergency caller in under 5 seconds and tracking indoor location changes in real-time thereafter.

Guardly provides mobile safety apps and cloud infrastructure for enterprise and public safety. Guardly's mobile safety apps act as personal emergency phones that broadcast real-time location, identity and support two-way communication with private security, authorities and personal safety groups. For enterprise security and police dispatch, Guardly provides a cloud-based incident management system rich with situational data to monitor, manage and respond to on-premise and remote worker emergencies.

Guardly Safe Campus, a solution designed for schools, was shown to help reduce emergency response times by around 44% at a university in a customer-led study performed 6 months ago. "Our IPS technology is another step towards Guardly delivering on its corporate mission to reduce emergency response times for people needing immediate assistance, and for those responding to requests for assistance," says Josh Sookman, Guardly Founder & CEO. "With Guardly IPS, all someone needs to do is launch our safety app and it will result in a personalized response to their exact indoor location. The implications of this innovation are truly game changing."

When an emergency occurs on a school campus or within a corporate office, hospital or public venue today, most calls made to local security personnel or police come from mobile phones or fixed emergency call boxes. Traditional emergency calls from mobile phones handled by the enterprise lack any form of indoor or outdoor location data, making it difficult to initiate response efforts; this can be further exacerbated if the mobile caller is unable to speak. While calls from emergency call boxes may have associated location data, emergencies can shift in location over time resulting in difficulties maintaining communication and coordinating response efforts.

"When a police dispatcher is working an emergency call, one of the first pieces of information required is an accurate location. Having the indoor location of mobile callers immediately available to dispatchers serves to reduce response times, especially for any campus that has multi-story buildings," said Rocco DelMonaco, Past VP University Safety at Georgetown University.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimates that 70% of 911 calls today are from wireless phones and that percentage is growing.i In context of 911 public safety networks, as of September 11, 2012 the FCC enforces Wireless E911 Phase 2 requirements, which state that wireless network operators must provide the GPS location of callers within 300 meters, within 6 minutes of a request by a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). Guardly IPS delivers at least an order of magnitude improvement in mobile emergency caller location accuracy over current public safety standards, giving its customers more precise data to act on and share with first responders to ensure more immediate and personalized emergency responses.

 “Over the past few years, our applications such as asset tracking, patient security and environmental monitoring have delivered proven and substantial benefits to hospitals worldwide,” said Baruch Yoeli, Vice President of Engineering at Stanley Healthcare. “Combining the leading data visualization and analytics capabilities from Tableau with our widely used healthcare solutions unlocks vast new opportunities to extract additional value from location, status and condition data, and will help customers make quicker and better informed decisions.”

More than 17,000 healthcare organizations worldwide rely on Stanley Healthcare solutions. Its Wi-Fi Real-Time Location System (RTLS) has the exclusive endorsement of the American Hospital Association, and the recent 2012 Best in KLAS Report named Stanley Healthcare’s solutions the Category Leader for RTLS for the second year in a row. In the report, 97 percent of Stanley Healthcare customers surveyed stated that they would “buy again” their RTLS solutions.

Tableau is a global leader in rapid-fire business intelligence software. It is known for its dashboards and advanced visual analytics, which allow anyone to quickly uncover valuable insights from vast amounts of data. In fact, Gartner positioned Tableau as a “Leader” in its 2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms* report.

Tableau’s software will be integrated with Stanley Healthcare’s MobileView software, the application platform and graphical user interface of its EcoSystem of healthcare solutions. Tableau analytics and data visualizations will be available first for Stanley Healthcare’s Asset Tracking & Management, Environmental Monitoring, Patient Safety, Security & Protection and Patient Flow solutions.

“Healthcare RTLS applications generate substantial amounts of data containing important intelligence that in the past has been difficult to attain,” said Dan Jewett, Vice President of Product Management at Tableau Software. “It’s a classic Big Data challenge and our software, combined with Stanley Healthcare’s solutions, can help departments across healthcare organizations easily gain access to this intelligence and act upon it in a way that directly impacts their business.”

With MobileView and Tableau, hospital staff will be able to drill down deeper than ever before into the large data sets generated to quickly solve critical business problems. For example, many hospitals use Stanley Healthcare’s Wi-Fi RTLS to track the real-time location and status of critical medical equipment throughout the hospital. Using Tableau’s advanced analytics capabilities, hospitals will not only be able to see the real-time location and status of items such as infusion pumps, they’ll also be able to quickly analyze historical and current par levels to predict and better plan future par levels, improving inventory allocation and utilization.

Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), a long-time Stanley Healthcare customer, is among the hospitals with early access to the MobileView and Tableau integration. According to Dennis Minsent, Director of Clinical Technology Services at Oregon Health & Science University, “We’re using Stanley Healthcare’s solutions to track the real-time location of nearly 4,000 infusion devices. The system is generating a significant amount of data, and we know there’s a tremendous amount of insight contained within that data. The combination of MobileView and Tableau Software will empower us to delve deeper into our asset tracking data to discover trends and solve resourcing issues without having to waste the time of IT analysts. This will help further extend the benefits of real-time location tracking to more aspects of hospital operations.”