California-based indoor IoT location services firm Kontakt.io has launched Portal Beam, a nine-in-one cloud-enabled sensor platform quantifying rooms and delivering building insights in real time.

Portal Beam uses nine sensors: thermal camera for occupancy and people counting, temperature, humidity, air quality, light, smoke detection, infra-red beaconing, RSSI fingerprinting, and iBeacon.

It comes with an eight-core CPU with neural network architecture and Bluetooth 5.0 readiness. Out of the box, it is compatible and seamlessly integrates with any BLE-gateway and the one-click, self-onboarding workflows of the Kio Cloud.

The Kio Cloud and Portal Beam say they are opening an era of IoT devices to quantify buildings, converging indoor location, environmental monitoring and occupancy analytics.

Portal Beam is a wireless, BLE, cloud-based product that runs on top of the Kio Cloud, delivering actionable insights in real time and helping people understand their physical workspace better. There are five main applications:

• Occupancy monitoring: Count people without requiring them to wear a beacon. Portal Beam deployed on a ceiling lets users monitor how people occupy spaces and track the occupancy of buildings, floors, rooms and desks without infringing on privacy.
• Environment monitoring: Monitor rooms round the clock. With its set of sensors, it helps ensure a safer and healthier workplace, reduces a building’s carbon footprint, and helps improve the employee experience.
• Indoor navigation: Enable indoor navigation. With built-in iBeacon, it improves orientation inside buildings with compatible indoor navigation apps.
• IR beaconing: Achieve room-level tracking certainty of IoT devices. Portal Beam enables location-tracking use cases in which room-level certainty is required. With IR-beaconing BLE-devices such as the Kontakt.io Smart Badge, people can be located with room-level certainty at all times. IR-beaconing enables high-accuracy location tracking use-cases especially relevant for healthcare and hospitality, including contact tracing, nurse duress, visitor management and evacuation tracking.
• Automated RSSI fingerprinting: Improve the location accuracy of existing BLE-enabled wifi access point networks. Extend the existing access point typology with Portal Beam combined with cloud AI and improve room-level accuracy for tracking any BLE devices.

“The introduction of the Kio Cloud-enabled Portal Beam represents a bold change that was over a year in the making, and marks a historic day for Kontakt.io’s future software-defined product portfolio,” said Philipp von Gilsa, Kontakt.io CEO. “This is the most powerful value proposition we’ve ever crafted targeting customers and partners in healthcare, workspaces and hospitality. The integrated hard- and software offering checks all the boxes.”

He said it could deliver occupancy, environmental IoT and location use-cases end-to-end to both enterprises using its open architecture, integrations and APIs as well as to SMBs with use-case specific apps and dashboards.

“The total cost of ownership of the entire product and architecture is less than a third of any alternative offerings in the space that mostly cover only parts of the value proposition,” said von Gilsa. “How do we do it? The device communicates directly with the wifi network you already have in place over BLE and completes it from both a soft- and hardware angle. Four years of battery life, no cabling and one-click onboarding to the cloud turn the planning, installation and maintenance cost close to zero. The new Kio Cloud, with its new policy foundry and event-stream APIs together with use-case specific apps allow you to tap into use-cases in minutes. It’s as easy as setting up a Nest or a Gmail account, just at enterprise scale.”

Portal Beam starter kits are available to pre-order for $339.