Dual-Use Indoor Location Platform

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Locating employees quickly in vast workplaces such as hotels is key to preventing or minimizing incidents. Locating 911 callers ensures that they get help on time. A new service provides enterprises and public safety agencies with pinpoint location, indoors and in high-rise buildings, with floor-level and room-level accuracy, a difficult challenge in such GPS-denied environments.

Orion Labs has announced Advanced Location Services, a high-accuracy, carrier-independent 3D location platform delivered via Polaris Wireless. The system enables customers to locate team members on the vertical axis accurate to three meters’ distance, to keep teams better-informed and better-connected, enhance team performance and improve worker safety.

The system works via Orion Sync, a standalone smart walkie-talkie, or as device as a service, in a smartphone form factor.

The system also protects lone workers. As co-founder and CTO Greg Albrecht explains:  “When lone workers call for help, security teams can rapidly dispatch assistance without the lone worker needing to explain their location,” Albrecht said. “This is the same kind of technology that first responders are now adopting to accurately and rapidly locate 911 callers facing life-threatening situations.”

A fundamental challenge in developing 3D location awareness indoors is the need for accurate, detailed 3D renderings of the physical buildings themselves. “For most buildings, this has never been done before and is often an arduous task to accomplish,” Albrecht added. “However, there is a mapping process to allow for precise data points to be leveraged within the Orion platform. It’s a very simple task that can be completed even by the hotel staff at the time of setup. After that, it’s extremely simple to set up teams within the Orion System with a 3D view of their property that they can use.”

The latest integration is undergoing tests at locations in Las Vegas and San Francisco, with more than 50 locations actively using the set-up, according to gpsworld.com.