Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise adds contact tracing to indoor Asset Tracking

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has now added contact tracing to its indoor Asset Tracking solution.

With meter-level accuracy, the solution enables the instant location of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags, which can be worn by people or attached to critical equipment, along with real-time and historic contact tracing. The solution is an evolution of the company's OmniAccess Stellar Asset Tracking solution, a key part of its indoor location services portfolio.

"The global health crisis has highlighted the need for organisations to have some method of contact tracing to keep track of past close physical contact between individuals, in order to keep their employees and customers safe," the company says.

"Real-time Contact Tracing also enables organisations to monitor the number of people present in a specific area and enforce social distancing measures by establishing active density control."

Visualisation, which supports density monitoring of sensitive areas and contact tracing, allows companies to:

• Define an area to monitor.
• Identify the number of individuals in the area.
• Notify personnel concerned based on specific criteria (for example, people moving beyond a limit or the number of people entering a site exceeding capacity limits).
• Use analytics to trace the history of location and flow of contacts. Let customers edit instant reports showing locations and flows of contacts, highlighting duration and distance.

"Contact tracing has become an essential feature for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise customers, especially in industries like healthcare or hospitality," says Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise vice president of Business Development, Laurent Bouchoucha.

"Adding this high-performing and data-rich functionality to our OmniAccess Stellar Asset Tracking solution was important to meet changing requirements driven by social distancing in public spaces."

Since its 2020 launch, the OmniAccess Stellar Asset Tracking solution has delivered asset tracking of critical items and people through cost-effective BLE indoor location technology. The system also provides valuable insight and location intelligence via historical and real-time positioning data and analytics, enabling improvements in productivity and workflow optimisation.

The solution uses the OmniAccess Stellar AP1201BG gateway, which can serve as both a BLE Gateway for asset tracking and a BLE Beacon for Location-Based Services simultaneously. It provides cloud connectivity over an existing Wi-Fi or LAN infrastructure and eliminates the need for a separate BLE infrastructure for Asset Tracking or Location-Based Services.

"OmniAccess Stellar Asset Tracking helps locate assets and track the movements of individuals in real-time from a mobile device or web management tool," says ALE executive vice president, Network Business Division, Stephan Robineau.

"It can track more than just the whereabouts of your assets, it enables analytics on usage patterns and locations. Our overlay solution works with ALE unified fabric, including the latest Wi-Fi 6 BLE-enhanced access points, but also existing infrastructure. This makes the OmniAccess Stellar Asset Tracking solution easy to implement and especially beneficial for large facilities with many devices and personnel."