Actility helps PenguinIN manage indoor positioning

  • January 24, 2022
  • Steve Rogerson

PenguinIN, Actility and its subsidiary Abeeway are expanding their IoT portfolios with joint offers, focusing primarily on managed indoor positioning and navigation for healthcare, construction, oil, gas, airports, education, hotels, theme parks and shopping centres.

PenguinIN is an indoor positioning and IoT use cases provider, headquartered in California with a regional office in Dubai. The company creates digital parallels for physical spaces to optimise day-to-day processes and create unique experiences for visitors and operators.

The company leverages all available radio and sensor information to provide indoor positioning information to build RoI-driven use cases.

The use of LoRaWan connectivity is one of the main keys to success of such use cases. LoRaWan is a widely used wireless protocol that allows battery-powered sensors to communicate with IoT applications via a long-range, ultra-low data rate connection, resulting in longer battery life.

Actility provides the LoRaWan IoT connectivity management with its ThingPark Enterprise, a platform that helps users build network infrastructure by managing LoRaWan gateways, adding sensors, monitoring network operations and controlling the flow of data to application servers, enabling the deployment of large-scale IoT projects in record time.

Actility’s subsidiary Abeeway provides various tracking devices that work indoors and outdoors thanks to their multi-technology geolocation system, integrating GPS, Abeeway’s patented low-power GPS, wifi sniffing and Bluetooth Low Energy.

As PenguinIN expands its portfolio of use cases, the need has surfaced for controllable long-range backhaul technologies. Actility was chosen for its private network server management and Abeeway asset management devices.

PenTrack, which is a software-based for cloud-hosted indoor tracking, offering accuracy and performance. It works with off-the-shelf tags and does not require proprietary hardware. Whether it is venue-wide presence or room-level accuracy, its machine learning algorithms are said to ensure accuracy with cost efficiency. Using Meraki’s location APIs, PenguinIN works with its clients deploying Meraki infrastructure to enable PenNav and PenTrack.

PenNav is a turn-by-turn indoor navigation offering delivered through mobile applications and digital kiosks. This is enriched with location-based messages, analytics and business rules. Offered as a managed service, accuracy of indoor positioning is maintained long after the initial system setup.

In healthcare, it can improve asset management for better availability and access for staff. PenguinIN also supports other relevant use cases such as automated entry, infection control and patient wandering.

For education, it can automatically track students’ attendance and enhance security of the student and staff population.

Retailers can use it to navigate shoppers through a shopping mall and support them with finding what they are looking for. They can be sent location- and context-based proximity marketing for higher engagement.

Airports can offer a seamless traveller’s journey by leveraging updated wait times, turn-by-turn navigation and proximity marketing.

Theme Parks can improve their guest journey based on PenguinIN’s indoor analytics. They can help visitors navigate through the facility and notify them about events and special offers

On the one hand, ThingPark Enterprise is a LoRaWan IoT connectivity management platform that helps users build network infrastructure by managing LoRaWan gateways, add LoRaWan devices, monitor network operations, and control the flow of data to application servers. ThingPark Enterprise is designed for enterprises: it’s scalable and easy to operate, and offers a low-power IoT communication infrastructure to enable industrial use cases.

On the other hand, Abeeway’s long autonomy devices allow continuous usage for months and years thanks to LoRaWan connectivity. The devices work indoors and outdoors thanks to their multi-technology geolocation system, integrating Abeeway’s patented low-power GPS, wifi sniffing, Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth LE Beaconing for precise indoor tracking. Abeeway devices combine location technologies, hardware, a selection of low-power chipsets and software optimisation. This allows flexible behaviour responsive to changing needs, and guaranteeing asset and people location in various coverage scenarios.

Making Abeeway trackers compatible with PenguinIN software allows new use cases for indoor and outdoor geolocation. The integration is designed to deliver reliable location data even in complex indoor and outdoor use cases or hazardous environments such as a construction site, mine or refinery. It provides real-time data of the operating status of machines and monitoring of mobile assets as well as people. This custom-fit IoT tracking is relevant for use cases such as asset tracking and management in indoor facilities, factories, resource tracking, theft prevention, warehouse logistics, and fleet management.

“Working on mixed indoor and outdoor employee and asset tracking and IoT sensing projects, we needed the support of a proven long range backhauling technology with low power profile,” said Essam Idrees, PenguinIN channel manager. “Actility and Abeeway were the best for our needs.”

Nicolas Jordan, COO at Actility, added: “Integrating ThingPark Enterprise and Abeeway tracking devices with PenguiIN’s advanced software gives us the opportunity to expand our end-to-end smart tracking for reliable indoor and outdoor human and asset safety and location.”