BLE and LoRaWAN for Personnel Mustering and Attendance Monitoring Solution
Anurag Kulshrestha
President & CEO at ANANTICS | Smart Mobility WG Co-Chair at RAIN RFID Alliance
We were asked by a client to bring a Personnel Mustering and Attendance Monitoring solution. The client wanted to track the presence and absence of their personnel on the worksite at any given time, and quickly find who all are missing at the Personnel Muster areas, which are commonly used for personnel to gather during accidents or other defined events.?
Being experienced and interested, we started talking with the client to better understand their detailed business requirements. It came to be that they wanted to find out how many workers are present during the work-shift along with detailed information such as names, clock-in and clock-out time, etc. An automated solution was needed, so workers don’t need to scan or key-in cards on the site for the personnel tracking. If an incident occurs at the site or a roll-call meeting is required, then the client would like to know who are present in the Muster Area and who are missing and where were they last located. This information facilitates rescue teams to provide help in an expedited manner.?
We had many possibilities of different technologies for the solution implementation perspective:
We started filtering out the possible RF technology solution approach for the client’s project.??
The first option was the utilization of active GPS Tags, but normal size GPS tags were not practical for the client’s requirements to have near real-time count in the Muster Area. It would require frequent GPS location pings, which would drain the battery fast and it will last only few days. This solution would also bring LTE (SIM Cards) recurring charges to upload their location data.?
Thereafter, we considered Passive UHF RFID tags, which can go on the workers’ hard hats. However, we learned that the client wanted minimum infrastructure on the site for locating and tracking personnel. Since, some physical structure was needed to mount UHF RFID Readers and Antennas on the site, so we continued the evaluation of other technology options.
As we started the process of narrowing down our options, we decided not to select BLE Tags with the BLE Gateways option, as it will require BLE Gateways installation (with electrical power and network connectivity) on the site. We even considered that we could bring 4G LTE modems to bring internet connectivity to BLE Gateways, but we then would have to handle the powering devices and the client did not want our devices to draw power from their resources.?
The UWB-based solution approach faced the same fate, as of BLE Gateways.
Moving on to our next option, we realized that using LoRaWAN technology based solution would be a better option for this client. LoRaWan Tags can send data packets through its chirp spread modulation technology to LoRaWAN Gateway at a larger distance, without any LTE or WiFi communication support. Our client has satellite offices within a couple of miles from the work site, so we decided to install outdoor LoRaWAN gateways at these office locations.
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First preference was given to GPS LoRaWAN Tags, but battery life was being issue since GPS modules consume more energy than that of BLE modules.
Consequently, we went with the option of BLE LoRaWAN Tags with Outdoor LoRaWAN Gateways and BLE Beacons. BLE Beacon’s internal battery lasts more than 5 years, and these beacons are smaller than a hockey puck, allowing them to be mounted at strategic locations on the worksite. These beacons would be the only piece of hardware on the site, for this solution approach.
BLE LoRaWAN Tags can be worn by workers using lanyards or belt clips. BLE LoRaWAN Trackers’ battery easily lasts for more than a month with even frequent data uplinks, and these tags can be re-charged once in a month as a client's administrative process.?
BLE LoRaWAN Tag scans the nearest BLE Beacon (giving the strongest RSSI) and it sends the Tag’s data along with the beacon’s information. This is fundamental for the location positioning system using BLE beacons and trackers. BLE trackers also have the built-in 9-axis accelerometer, so we know when it is moving and other movement related events information.
We also built our own LoRaWAN Network Server (LNS), which gets all LoRaWAN devices data stream events, and our broker service grabs it continuously and queues in the messaging service. This way all raw RF data gets processed in near real-time and feeds our Web APIs to serve custom-built Dashboards and Software Solution’s User Interface.
I hope this use-case can provide you some thoughts on how to deal with your similar business requirements.
Anantics (https://www.anantics.com/) brings expertise with multiple RF (UHF RFID, BLE, UWB, LoRaWAN) technologies and tailored custom software solutions, along with professional services. We act as a one-stop solution provider to identify, locate, control and track IoT devices, which can be attached to any living and non-living object. We also integrate different types of sensor systems with our AutoID solutions.
Feel free to contact us at [email protected]?