RTLS in Hospitals
Real-time location systems, and why finding a wheelchair is a strategic problem.
10 min readUpdated March 30, 20262 topics
The technologies
| Technology | Typical accuracy | Cost/tag | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wi-Fi RSSI | 3–10 m | Low | Reuses existing APs; coarse |
| BLE (iBeacon-class) | 1–5 m | Low | Battery-friendly; corridor-level |
| Ultrasound | 0.3–1 m | Med | Room-level certainty |
| Infrared | Room-level | Low | Line-of-sight; simple |
| UWB (IEEE 802.15.4z) | 10–30 cm | High | True indoor positioning |
| RFID (passive) | Point-of-read | Very low | Choke points only |
Accuracy vs. use case
- Asset recovery — room-level is enough.
- Nurse-call presence verification — room-level.
- Hand-hygiene compliance — sub-meter, near sink.
- Contact tracing — room-level with time-stamped dwell.
- Fall response verification — room-level within seconds.
How it gets used
The most durable RTLS deployments are the boring ones: knowing where every infusion pump is, how long a room turnover took, whether a nurse actually entered the room after a call. The workflow data is more valuable than the recovered wheelchair.
Standards
- IEEE 802.15.4z — UWB.
- IEC 80001-1 — RTLS on a clinical network is a medical-device network component.
- IHE Location Services Profile (LOC) — cross-vendor location semantics.
References & further reading
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