Most RTLS buying guides are written by the vendor selling the ceiling hardware. This one explains both architectures, including where ours is the wrong answer.
A real-time location system tells you where something is inside your facility — a pump, a bed, a member of staff, a phone — and keeps telling you as it moves. GPS does not work indoors, so RTLS uses something else: Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, ultra-wideband, infrared, or some combination.
In hospitals it usually gets bought for one of five reasons: finding mobile equipment, proving equipment utilisation before buying more, locating staff for dispatch or safety, monitoring temperature-sensitive storage, or infant and patient elopement protection.
Almost every vendor is one of these. The distinction matters more than the radio technology, because it determines what you install, what you pay up front, and how long it takes.
You deploy readers — ceiling devices, gateways, or BLE-capable access points — on a density grid. Tags broadcast; the fixed readers listen. Vendors include CenTrak, Kontakt.io, Securitas Healthcare and AiRISTA. Modern versions are often battery-powered and can ride existing Wi-Fi access points, so this no longer implies rewiring.
Strength: consistent, continuous coverage everywhere you installed it, with room- or bed-level certainty.
Cost: a capital project per building, plus licensing. Coverage stops at the edge of the install.
The mobile devices already moving through the building do the listening. No fixed readers. Tags are still cheap and passive; the reader network is staff-carried.
Strength: no installation, no capital hardware, coverage from day one wherever staff actually go.
Cost: subscription. The trade is accuracy granularity and coverage in areas people rarely walk through.
Four questions cut through most RTLS sales decks. Bring them to every vendor, including us.
For scale: ECRI priced one identical scenario — a 300-bed hospital, 3,000 tags, room-level accuracy — between $100,000 and $2 million depending only on which tracking technology was chosen. The technology decision, not the vendor logo, is what moves the number.
“Room-level accuracy” often means room-level in rooms you paid to instrument, and department-level everywhere else. Ask for the accuracy figure and the coverage map together; either one alone is marketing.
Get the reader count per building and the density rule behind it — published guidance in this market runs to roughly one gateway per 800–1,000 sq ft for zone level and tighter for sub-room. Ask whether your existing access points qualify or need replacing, because an AP refresh is the hidden prerequisite that turns a software purchase into a capital project.
Infrastructure costs repeat per building. Ask what the second and third building cost, not just the pilot.
Batteries die. Ask the expected life, what replacement looks like across thousands of assets, and whether the system tells you a tag has gone quiet.
We are device-based, and we are explicit about the trade. NavvTrack already runs on the managed iPhones health systems deploy to clinical and support staff — that fleet becomes the reader network. Add a NavvTrack Tag COMING SOON to a pump or a chair and it appears on the same indoor map your teams already use.
Measured, not claimed. Over the last 30 days at a live health system, the iPhone fleet reported a median indoor accuracy of 2.0 m, 92% of indoor fixes within 5 m, and a floor level on every indoor fix (314,000 fixes, surveyed floors). Those are the phones’ own accuracy estimates, not survey error — and they are the numbers we commit to: about 2 m median on surveyed floors, a floor level on every indoor fix, and nothing installed in the building to get there. On Android (2027) we expect 1–2 m where access points support Wi-Fi RTT and roughly 3–8 m from fingerprinting elsewhere; we will publish measured numbers once it ships.
When you should not pick us: if you need continuous bed-level certainty in every room, infant security, or regulated temperature monitoring, buy an infrastructure-based system. We will say so on the call.
For finding equipment, yes — knowing the floor and wing turns a twenty-minute search into a one-minute walk. The phones themselves resolve to about 2 m on a surveyed floor; a tag inherits the position of whichever phone heard it, so it lands at zone level. For clinical workflows that depend on knowing which specific bay something is in, you need denser infrastructure.
Ultra-wideband gives excellent precision and is genuinely the best radio for sub-metre accuracy. It also needs anchors installed throughout the space, which puts it firmly in the infrastructure-based category with the cost profile that implies.
Most infrastructure vendors offer Epic and Meditech integrations for workflow use cases. Ask specifically which workflows, because the depth varies a lot.
With a device-based system, yes — the pilot is a box of tags. With an infrastructure system the smallest unit is usually one instrumented department.
