Bluetooth Low Energy tags and beacons for indoor asset and personnel location, giving zone-level to few-metre accuracy with battery life measured in years. For most indoor tracking questions this is the right answer, and the question is usually which room rather than which bay.
A BLE tag advertises periodically. Gateways or receivers within range hear it, measure signal strength, and the platform infers which zone the tag is in. It is not precise positioning, and for most operational questions it does not need to be — knowing which building, which floor or which area answers the question that was actually being asked.
The advantage is everything else. Tags cost little, run one to five years on a coin cell depending on advertising interval and temperature, need only receivers rather than a surveyed anchor network, and can be attached to almost anything.
The two things that catch people out are mounting and reporting policy. Metal, liquid and curvature all detune a small antenna, so a tag that works on a cardboard box may not work on a steel cage. And advertising interval, not cell chemistry, is what actually determines battery life.
| Parameter | Detail |
|---|---|
| Link | Bluetooth Low Energy |
| Accuracy | Zone level to a few metres |
| Battery life | 1–5 years on a coin cell, depending on advertising interval and temperature |
| Infrastructure | BLE gateways or receivers on site |
| Range | 10–100 m depending on environment |
| Mounting | Antenna detuning by metal, liquid and curvature is a design consideration |
| Typical markets | Warehousing, manufacturing, healthcare, facilities |
Maturity — silicon-proven, FPGA-validated or RTL stage — is confirmed at enquiry for the specific configuration you need, rather than claimed generically here.
Send the target node, the interface requirements and the integration context. If this is not the right fit, that will be said early rather than discovered at integration.
Typically one to five years on a coin cell, though advertising interval and temperature dominate over cell chemistry. A tag advertising every second and one advertising every ten seconds have very different lifetimes.
Zone level to a few metres, depending on receiver density. If the operational question is which room or which area, that is sufficient. If it is which bay within a room, UWB is the appropriate technology.
Usually mounting. Metal, liquid and curved surfaces detune a small antenna, so a tag characterised on a cardboard box may perform very differently on a steel cage or a liquid container.
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