Location technologies

Royal Ottawa implements Ekahau system

OTTAWA – Ekahau Inc., a leader in Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), announced that the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre (ROMHC), a provider of specialized mental health services in Eastern Ontario, is utilizing Ekahau RTLS to improve patient and staff safety.

The Ekahau RTLS solution, which includes the Ekahau T301BD pager tags worn by hospital staff, will enable faster response times when patients or staff need assistance by pinpointing their location.

“At the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, we use cutting-edge technologies to help us improve patient care, increase efficiency and ensure the safety of everyone at our facilities, and we continually seek innovations to support these goals,” said Cal Crocker, vice president of Corporate Services and chief financial officer at Royal Ottawa Health Care Group. “Ekahau RTLS and its badge tags are an ideal fit for this strategy, allowing us to leverage our existing Wi-Fi network for advanced location tracking applications.”

According to the company, Ekahau RTLS is the only Wi-Fi-based location tracking solution that can operate over any Wi-Fi network, regardless of brand or generation.

Because it is standards-based, Ekahau RTLS can be deployed in a matter of days or weeks, eliminating the expense and time required by other systems to install readers, cabling, choke points and exciters. Ekahau RTLS enables users to pinpoint location down to the sub-room level. The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre has deployed Ekahau RTLS over its existing, facility-wide Wi-Fi network.

The Ekahau T301BD Wi-Fi pager tags include a dedicated button than can be pressed in the event of an emergency, to alert staff of the situation and where it is happening. The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre has more than 300 tags in use now by its staff.

“We are pleased to be working with Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre on an application that enhances patient care and provides for greater staff safety throughout the entire facility,” said Tuomo Rutanen, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development for Ekahau. “Ekahau’s tags and superior location accuracy combine to deliver a state-of-the-art safety solution for healthcare facilities, like the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre.”

About Royal Ottawa Health Care Group
The Royal provides specialized mental health services for residents of communities across Eastern Ontario with complex and serious mental illnesses. The Royal’s clinicians work with community partners to ensure patients/clients receive timely access to various models of treatment including inpatient, outpatient, partial hospitalization, day hospital, assertive community treatment, outreach and consultation. The Royal also conducts leading edge mental health research and is a teaching hospital of the University of Ottawa with links to additional academic institutions.

About Ekahau Inc.
Ekahau Inc. is an industry leader in providing Wi-Fi-based RTLS solutions. Ekahau’s RTLS technology is routinely recognized for its superior performance in customer benchmarking and competitive evaluations of Wi-Fi-based location tracking solutions. Ekahau’s customers, including several Fortune 500 companies worldwide, are realizing the benefits of Wi-Fi based location services and innovative Wi-Fi network planning and optimization tools. Ekahau’s solutions are being used in more than 200 hospitals around the world, as well as by manufacturers, mining/oil/gas companies, government agencies and the military. Ekahau partners include wireless software developers, leading system integrators and international OEM partners, who develop and market wireless enterprise applications. Ekahau is a U.S. based corporation, with offices in Saratoga, Calif.; Reston, Va.; Helsinki, Finland; and Hong Kong, China.

Posted July 15, 2010