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How to use iBeacons for asset tracking for mobile equipment within premises for real time monitoring.
Advent of iBeacon tags and devices has given businesses an innovative way to track assets as well as Personnel, both outdoor as well as within indoor premises. iBeacon technology gives unprecedented accuracy in terms of indoor tracking.
Business usage of iBeacon asset tracking may vary from business to business. We will start with asset proximity detection in this blog posts and will cover other use cases for businesses in upcoming blog posts.
Asset proximity detection is useful in case where for example you have a large warehouse and there are lot of products stacked in the same. Finding any specific box or product becomes quite hectic in such cases.
In this case, you tag each box or product with an iBeacon tag. Your supervisor can have a mobile app which can be programmed to send alert when you are in proximity of the required box or product. In this mobile device basically scans all iBeacon tags available in proximity and based on your requirement alerts you when the required box is found.
Alerts and notification can be triggered based on your business requirements.
RFID has been a forerunner in asset tracking and monitoring for years, though it had many limitations in terms of implementation as well as operations. But over the last few years, asset tracking has seen a paradigm shift with arrival of new technologies like iBeacon and UWB, which have upgraded the process of asset tracking and monitoring giving more effective and accurate results.
We will be discussing more about iBeacon asset tracking in this blog post and see how and why iBeacon technology is more effective and accurate when it comes to tracking your valuable assets.
Implementation
The biggest advantage with iBeacon asset tracking is that its implementation is independent of your existing IT infrastructure, means the whole system can run without any interference in your existing network. iBeacon tags or devices which are used for tagging your assets use BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and are powered with replaceable batteries and do not require any network or power connection. These tags are read by specific readers and apps which are programmed to send you alerts or notifications.
Geolocation
In case of iBeacon, the geolocation works both indoors as well as outdoors and gives you unprecedented accuracy where you can track an asset in range of less a meter. The accuracy of tracking using beacons can significantly increase by increasing number of Beacons. iBeacons are most effective when it comes to indoor tracking for assets as well as personnel also.
Operations
Since iBeacon technology is self-dependent and does not have any dependency on your IT infrastructure (apart from internet for data transfer), its operational cost is quite low as compared to other technologies or methods of asset tracking. On top of that, cost of Beacons is quite low as compared to other technologies, thus keeping your overall implementation and operational costs on lower side.
We will cover more about Beacon Asset Tracking in our next article. Keep reading and following us for more information articles on IoT technologies and how these are impacting business processes.