# People Tracking

> Personnel tracking for factories, cleanrooms and campuses, and indoor wayfinding for the visitors walking the same building.

- **Page** - https://iotready.com/solutions/wayfinding
- **Tagline** - Who is on site, which zone they are in, and how they find their way around it.

Two kinds of people move through a building, and they need opposite things. The
people who work there should be accounted for without being asked to stop and
prove it. The people visiting should be able to find where they are going.

Both run on the same beacons and gateways, so a site that puts the estate up for
one gets the other for the cost of the tags.

## Tracking the people who work there

Workers carry a tag: a BLE ID card, a wristband, a lanyard, a keychain fob, or
one stitched into a uniform where compliance has to be automatic. RFID readers
at entry points catch the crossings, BLE gateways watch presence inside a zone,
and neither asks anyone to swipe anything.

That covers a handful of jobs that are otherwise done by hand:

**Attendance.** Entry time, exit time and duration per person per zone, recorded
by walking through the door. Late arrivals and no-shows are flagged as they
happen instead of at the end of the month.

**Restricted zones.** Define who may be where, and during which hours. An
unauthorised entry raises an alert naming the person, the zone and the time. The
readers carry a relay, so they drive a door or a barrier directly.

**Emergency mustering.** During an evacuation the dashboard shows who is still
inside and where. The headcount updates as people pass the exit readers, so
somebody missing is known in seconds rather than through a roll call.

**Audit presence.** Pharma and food plants have to show that only trained,
authorised people were in a controlled area while a batch ran. The presence
record is timestamped and attaches to the batch.

| RFID                            | BLE                         |
| ------------------------------- | --------------------------- |
| Zone level, read at the doorway | Room level, 1 to 3 m        |
| Up to 10 m                      | Up to 100 m                 |
| Check-in and check-out          | Continuous presence         |
| No battery in the tag           | About three years on a cell |
| Readers at access points        | A gateway per zone          |

Most sites run both. RFID at the doors it already has, BLE in the zones where
knowing someone is inside matters more than knowing they came in.

Pharmaceutical plants use it for cleanroom access and GMP zone compliance.
Factories use it for safety zones, contractor tracking and shift attendance.
Campuses use it for student attendance and visitor management.

## Wayfinding for everyone else

Big venues are hard to walk. A convention centre, an airport, a hospital, a
mall: people miss their turning, arrive late, and give up looking for the thing
they came for. GPS is no help once you are inside, and no help at all when what
you want is two floors down.

Wayfinding puts a blue dot on your own floor plan and moves it as the visitor
moves. After that it works the way everyone already expects a map to work.
Search for where you are going, follow the line, arrive.

- **0** Apps to install
- **2 s** How often the dot moves
- **Both** iOS and Android, from a tap or a QR code

### Nothing to install

A visitor scans a code at the entrance and the map opens. No download, no
account, no setup. On iPhones it opens as an App Clip, on Android as an app that
arrives from the same tap. Both feel like a website and behave like an app.

![Two phone screens side by side, one showing a blue dot and a routed path on a floor plan with a 150 m, 3 min banner, the other showing a search for a destination listed by floor](https://iotready.com/images/hero/wayfinding-app-screens.jpg)

_Your floor plan, your names for things. The dot is the visitor, the line is the way there._

### Once they are on the map

Knowing where a visitor is standing makes a few other things easy.

Offers land when they are useful. A cafe promotion means something to someone
who is twenty metres from the cafe and nothing to someone in the car park, and
the map knows which is which.

Regulars are recognised without a login. Nobody is asked to sign up, and the
venue still gets to tell a first visit from a fifth.

Help has an address. A visitor who taps the safety button shows up next to a
named pillar on a named floor, and your team is told which one.

And you find out how the building is really used: where people gather, where
they stall, which routes nobody takes.

### Your building, your map

The plans you already have are the ones we use. Points of interest get your
names, routes follow your corridors instead of cutting through walls, and adding
a new shop or moving an entrance takes an afternoon.

![An operator screen showing a floor plan with route nodes, connecting paths and destination pins drawn on top of it](https://iotready.com/images/hero/wayfinding-corridor-editor.jpg)

_Routes are drawn once, on your own plan. Visitors follow what you drew\._

## The hardware is one small thing

Beacons go up on ceilings or walls, run on a battery, and need no wiring and no
network of their own. Each one carries a QR code, so putting the estate on the
map is a walk around the building with a phone rather than a survey crew and a
licence fee.

![A black BLE beacon with two screw tabs and a QR code label on its face](https://iotready.com/images/hero/wayfinding-beacon.png)

_This is the whole install. Screw it up, scan the code, move to the next one._

They are ordinary Bluetooth beacons in a standard format, so the estate stays
yours to add to or replace. If you already have beacons in the building for
[asset tracking](https://iotready.com/solutions/asset-tracking.md), they will do this job too.

## Identity + Quantity + Context = Truth

- **Identity** - A BLE ID card, wristband, lanyard or in-garment tag on a worker, or the visitor's own phone.
- **Quantity** - Presence and dwell per zone, read continuously rather than signed for at a door.
- **Context** - The zone, the shift, the batch being run and the authorisations the person carries.

## What captures it

- [BLE Wristband Beacon](https://iotready.com/hardware/ble-beacon-wristband.md): A replaceable-band wristband beacon with an SOS button, IP67 sealing and a 16-month battery, for staff, contractor and patient presence tracking.
- [BLE Gateway](https://iotready.com/hardware/ble-gateway.md): The anchor half of a real-time location system. Wall-mounted, wired for Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and able to raise a local alarm on its own.
- [RFID Reader](https://iotready.com/hardware/rfid-fixed-gate.md): One UHF platform, ordered as Long Range for dock doors and gates or Short Range for point-of-sale and desks - the same read event either way.