Real time location system for staff and visitors: safety first, surveillance never
Know who is still inside during an evacuation, see where a contractor went after reception, prove that a restricted area stayed restricted. A real time location system can do all of this with BLE badges, with your cameras, or with a mix of both. It can also be the fastest way to lose the trust of the people who work for you. Since 2011 we help teams work out which of the two they are about to build.
If your goal is to measure productivity, read the section on when locating people is the wrong answer before you book anything.
The problems this actually solves
Locating people indoors is justified by a small number of concrete situations. If none of these describes your building, the case for a real time location system is weak and you should say so internally before a vendor says it for you.
In an evacuation, nobody can say who is still inside
The muster list is a printout from the access control system, and it is already wrong: people tailgate through doors, visitors leave without badging out, contractors never badged in. The fire warden is counting heads in a parking lot and hoping.
Visitors and contractors move where they should not
Reception issues a badge and the escort rule survives until the first corridor. Nobody notices a visitor in a plant room or a ward until something goes wrong, and then the question is when they got there and how long they stayed.
Compliance asks for evidence you cannot produce
An auditor wants proof of who entered a controlled area and for how long. Door logs show entries at doors, not presence in a room, and they say nothing about the people who came in behind someone else.
Staff spend the day finding each other
In a large hospital, plant or campus, locating the one colleague with the right skill is a sequence of phone calls. It is a small cost per event and a large one per year, and it is invisible in every budget.
Your badges only know doors
You already issue badges, so you already have data. It stops at the threshold: a badge swipe tells you someone passed a reader, not where they went next, and not whether they are still there.
Three questions to answer before you buy anything
For asset projects these questions decide the budget. For people projects they also decide whether the system will be accepted or quietly defeated. Answer them honestly, including the third one. We have worked through them in healthcare, where a chain of private clinics in the United States is one of our clients.
01. Do you need position, or presence?
Knowing that someone is in the east wing is a different system from knowing where they are in it to within a couple of meters. Zone level presence costs less, needs less infrastructure and is far easier to justify to staff. Most safety and mustering use cases only need presence.
02. Do you need a name, or a role and a count?
For evacuation, what you need is how many people are in each zone, and who has not been accounted for. That can run on pseudonymous badge identifiers, with the name resolved only when an alarm makes it necessary. Naming everyone on a live map by default is a design decision, and usually not a requirement.
03. Would you be comfortable explaining this to the people being located?
Imagine describing the system in an all hands meeting: what it records, who can see it, how long it is kept, what happens on a break. If that sentence is hard to say out loud, the system will be resented, badges will spend their lives in drawers, and your data will be worthless. This is the most useful test we know.
The two technologies we use for people, and one for very large sites
We do not have a single answer for locating people. Badges give you identity and work anywhere you can mount receivers. Video gives you counts and flows without identity. On very large multi-building sites, long-range positioning covers ground that would otherwise need hundreds of indoor devices. The Bluetooth Beacon Tracker and the Sentinel Video Tracker are ours. RFID, UWB and Wi-Fi positioning are not, and we supply and integrate those as well, so what we recommend is never limited to what we manufacture.
BLE badges and beacons, our Bluetooth Beacon Tracker
The badge is a standard iBeacon that only transmits: no microphone, no camera, no stored history on the person. Battery life is measured in years, radio range reaches up to 50 m, and at full power the beacon sends a signal every 4 to 5 seconds. Receiving nodes on the ceiling pick those signals up at up to 30 m and the server calculates the position by trilateration, with no fingerprinting and no training phase.
What the BLE system delivers
Accuracy: 1 to 3 meters in 90 percent of cases.
Update rate: in the order of seconds.
Floors: up to 30 levels from -10 to +20 plus the ground floor, one floor plan per level.
Ceilings: works well up to 7 m.
Nodes: Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz, or Ethernet on the V3 model, USB 5V power, operating range -20 to +60/65 degrees C.
Output: WGS 84 coordinates or metric X and Y, REST API, push callbacks, optional daily CSV with positions every 5 seconds.
Dashboard: live map, polygon geofences, three access levels, node health alerts by email.
Hosting: cloud by default, on-premise supported.
Video, our Sentinel Video Tracker
Where you need to know how many people are in a space and how they move through it, but not who they are, video on your existing CCTV is often the better fit. It resolves position to 20 cm and identifies nobody. For visitor flows in public areas this is usually the more proportionate choice, and the easier one to get approved.
Long-range positioning, through our partner Wheere
For a site of several buildings, or thick concrete where short-range signals struggle, we can propose the technology of our partner Wheere. According to Wheere, it works on low-frequency radio between 148 and 174 MHz, about four gateways cover up to roughly one square kilometer, it penetrates concrete, supports an unlimited number of devices and delivers sub-meter accuracy. Those figures are Wheere's own, and we validate them on your site before anyone commits.
Locating employees: where the line is
Tracking staff is not a technical problem with a legal footnote. In the EU it is a legal and industrial relations problem with a technical component, and the order matters. This is the part of the project that most often fails, and it fails after the hardware is installed.
Consent from an employee is usually not a valid basis
Under the GDPR, consent has to be freely given, and the power imbalance between employer and employee means regulators rarely accept it at work. In practice you build on another lawful basis, typically a legitimate interest or a legal obligation such as safety, and you have to document why the monitoring is necessary and proportionate for that specific purpose. Confirm the analysis with your legal counsel for your country.
Purpose limitation is the whole argument
Locating people to get them out of a burning building is proportionate. Using the same data to measure how long someone spent away from their workstation is a different purpose, and it is the one that ends up in a tribunal or a newspaper. Decide the purposes up front, write them down, and configure the system so the others are not technically available.
Collect less, on purpose
Zone instead of coordinates. Pseudonymous badge identifiers instead of names on the map. Alerts instead of a permanently watched live view. A short retention period, days rather than years, unless an incident freezes the record. No tracking outside shift hours, and excluded areas for break rooms and toilets. Every one of these reduces both the risk and the resistance.
Worker representatives come before the purchase order
In several European countries you cannot simply install this. In Italy, tools from which remote monitoring of workers may derive fall under Article 4 of the Workers' Statute, which requires a union agreement or authorization from the labor inspectorate. In France, the CNIL has published guidance on employee geolocation and the works council has to be consulted. Plan this as a project phase with its own calendar, not as paperwork at the end. Your legal counsel confirms what applies to you.
Visitors are not employees, and the rules differ
Visitor badges are usually easier: a defined visit, a short retention, a clear notice at reception, a badge handed back at the door. Do not let the visitor use case quietly extend to staff because the hardware happens to be the same.
Trust is the feature that makes the data usable
A system that staff accept gets worn, charged and reported when it breaks. A system they resent gets left in a locker, swapped between colleagues or wrapped in foil, and then you are paying for a dashboard full of confident, wrong positions. The privacy design is not a tax on the project, it is what keeps the data true.
When locating people is the wrong answer
We turn down this kind of project more often than any other. Four cases where a real time location system is the wrong purchase, or the right purchase for the wrong reason.
If the goal is productivity or attendance, do not do it
Location data is a poor proxy for output, it collapses the moment people learn how it works, and in the EU it is the use case most likely to be challenged by a works council or a regulator. Presence in a building is also not hours worked: using positioning data to police start times gets the whole project reframed as surveillance, and time and attendance is an HR system with its own rules and approvals. Keep the two apart, technically and in the way you describe them. If the real question is why work takes so long, the answer comes from process analysis, not from a map with dots on it.
A transmit-only badge cannot call for help
Our BLE badge broadcasts its identifier and nothing else. It has no button, no fall detection and no return channel, so it cannot raise an alarm by itself. It tells you where someone was when an alarm was raised elsewhere, which is useful, and different. If lone worker safety is the real requirement, that is a device category of its own, with its own standards. We assess it, specify it against the alternatives and manage the project end to end. For that category, which parts we supply directly and which come through a partner depends on your site and your country, and we confirm that on the discovery call.
It does not stop anyone entering a restricted area
Positioning tells you that someone is somewhere they should not be, seconds after they are. Prevention is a lock, a turnstile or an interlock, in other words access control. Tracking complements access control, it does not replace it, and confusing the two produces an expensive alerting system that prevents nothing.
It is not fast enough for machine safety
Positions update in the order of seconds, which is fine for people and locations and not fine for anti-collision between a forklift and a pedestrian. Safety-critical reaction below one second is a different class of system, and we will tell you so rather than sell you this one.
What it costs
Our minimum commitment is USD 5,000. There is no price list, because the number depends on decisions made during the assessment. For people projects, one of the largest costs is not hardware at all.
Area, floors and how precise you need to be
Cost follows the number of receiving nodes, and node density follows the accuracy you asked for. Zone level presence needs far fewer nodes than 1 to 3 meter positioning across the same floor. This single decision moves the budget more than any other.
How many people, and who manages the badges
Badges themselves are inexpensive and long-lived. The recurring work is issuing them, reclaiming them from leavers, handling visitors at reception and dealing with the ones that get taken home. Someone has to own that process or the data decays within months.
Integration with the systems you already run
Access control, HR directory, visitor management and building management each add integration work. There is a REST API and push callbacks, so the data can go where you need it, but mapping badge identifiers to people is a project decision with privacy consequences, not a connector.
The approval phase
Data protection impact assessment, consultation with worker representatives, signage, internal communication. This costs calendar time more than money, and skipping it is the most expensive option of all.
How we work
Four steps. On people projects we add one rule: the pilot runs with volunteers who know exactly what is being recorded.
Step 01. Free 30-minute discovery call
What are you trying to prevent, and who is asking for it. We go through presence against position, names against counts, and we say early if access control or a better muster process would solve it without locating anybody.
Step 02. Site assessment
Scaled floor plans with the areas to cover, ceiling heights, Wi-Fi coverage and power sockets, plus a few photos. Metal structures, mirrors and very thick walls all change the design, and it is cheaper to find them on a plan than on site.
Step 03. Pilot
At least six nodes, covering roughly 300 square meters, in one real area of your building with people who have agreed to take part. You see the true accuracy in your environment, and your DPO and staff representatives see exactly what the system records, on something real rather than a brochure.
Step 04. Rollout, integration and governance
Remaining areas, integration through the REST API or push callbacks, geofences and alerts configured for the agreed purposes only, and a written description of what is collected, who can see it and how long it is kept. That document is what makes the next audit short.
Frequently asked questions
What is a real time location system, in plain terms?
A real time location system tells you where something or someone is inside a building, continuously, on a map of your floor plan. For people, the tag is usually a badge, receivers on the ceiling hear it, and a server calculates the position. The word real time is doing a lot of work in that phrase: our BLE system updates in the order of seconds, which is right for people and wrong for machine safety.
How accurate is it when tracking people?
Our Bluetooth Beacon Tracker delivers 1 to 3 meters in 90 percent of cases, with updates in the order of seconds. Final accuracy depends on the building and on node density, which is why we validate it in a pilot rather than promising it in a proposal. Worth knowing: the system performs better in buildings with walls than in large open spaces, because signals attenuate more predictably.
Is it legal to locate employees in the EU?
It can be, for defined purposes such as safety and emergency evacuation, with a documented lawful basis, a data protection impact assessment, transparency towards the people concerned and data minimization. It also usually requires involving worker representatives before deployment: in Italy under Article 4 of the Workers' Statute, in France through works council consultation and in line with CNIL guidance. What is not defensible is deploying it for one purpose and using it for another. Have your legal counsel confirm the requirements in your country before you buy hardware.
Can we track zones only, instead of exact positions?
Yes, and it is often the better answer. Zone or proximity mode needs fewer nodes, costs less and is much easier to explain to staff, because the system records that someone is in an area rather than where they are standing in it. If presence per zone answers your question, we will recommend it over full positioning.
Do people need an app on their phone?
No. The badge is a standard iBeacon that only transmits, so nothing is installed on personal phones and the person does not need to carry a company device. The infrastructure side needs receiving nodes with 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi coverage, or Ethernet on the V3 model, plus power sockets.
What is the minimum budget and can we start small?
USD 5,000 is our minimum commitment, and starting small is what we recommend anyway. A pilot of at least six nodes covering roughly 300 square meters in one area gives you real accuracy figures in your own building and gives your staff representatives something concrete to review before the project scales.
Specifications
BLE accuracy: 1 to 3 m in 90 percent of cases
Update rate: In the order of seconds
Badge: Standard iBeacon, transmit only, battery life in years, range up to 50 m
Nodes: Ceiling mounted BLE receivers, detect beacons up to 30 m, Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz or Ethernet on V3, USB 5V
Environment: Ceilings up to 7 m, operating temperature -20 to +60/65 degrees C
Floors: Up to 30 levels from -10 to +20 plus ground floor, one floor plan per level
Output: WGS 84 or metric X and Y, REST API, push callbacks, optional daily CSV with positions every 5 seconds
Dashboard: Live map, polygon geofences, three access levels, node health alerts
Hosting: Cloud by default, on-premise supported
Video option: Sentinel Video Tracker, 20 cm position accuracy on existing CCTV, no identification
Talk to an engineer, not a salesperson
Bring the situation you are trying to prevent and a floor plan. In 30 minutes you will know whether presence or position is what you need, roughly what infrastructure that implies, and which parts of the project are legal work rather than technical work. If the honest answer is that you should not locate people at all, we will tell you that too.