By Erin Register and Shannon McGinley
smart position CEO Byron Webster said, “smart position started when I was fortunate enough to connect with Sebastian van Wickern, and Ronald Derler of smart IoT group in early 2020. smart IoT develops cutting-edge smart device and Internet of Things (IoT) products for leading medical device companies in Germany like Roche and Boehringer-Ingelheim. smart IoT had just finished a research project for peerless 4-dimensional location accuracy with the Bochum University of Applied Sciences and had already created a secured software platform to take advantage of this new location technology.”
Around this time, Webster also connected with Roderick Bell, who has over 20 years of experience in healthcare technology and IT services for leading U.S. health care systems, such as Wellvana Health and Resolute Health.
“With my background in real-time location systems (RTLS) from my AeroScout days, supply chain management and visibility with my Global Med Cables company and overall operational efficiency solutions, it was a perfect match to combine our passions and launch smart position in the U.S.,” added Webster.
TechNation learned more about this new company in an interview with Webster.
Q: What is the main focus of smart position?
A: There are a lot of organizations out there that simply don’t have the internal resources, time or budget to deploy RTLS for equipment or environmental monitoring. Too many organizations are still manually locating equipment or monitoring environments, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
smart position focuses on helping overwhelmed staff be more efficient. We focus on helping hospitals and clinics who want an RTLS but don’t have a lot of staff to deploy and maintain. We focus on temperature monitoring for labs, blood and tissue banks, pharmacies, nutrition and pathology and asset location for patient care, medical equipment recalls, and overall operations.
And we do this using the latest in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, which keeps costs down while opening up new application opportunities.
Q: What are some services smart position offers?
A: We work closely with customers from beginning to end on everything they need to create, deploy and use their RTLS and monitoring solutions. We audit customer use cases to provide the appropriate quote, so customers know exactly what they’re going to need as far as hardware, software, labor, training and support. Use cases range from simple temperature monitoring of 5 to 500 refrigerators for complete regulatory compliance to PAR-level asset management or integrations with an equipment maintenance management system.
Due to our commitment to BLE technology and agile software development, deploying additional use cases is easy; this is where we shine. We work with customers to figure out ways to best use smart position. In fact, right now we’re working with a customer to use BLE tags for emergency calls and to notify cleaning staff of a soiled room.
Q: How does smart position stand out in the medical equipment field?
A: We call smart position next generation because that’s exactly what it is. We reimagined RTLS from the ground up with the latest BLE, location technology, software interfaces and security. smart position is light, effortless and cost-effective which is the exact opposite of a big, bulky, complicated and expensive legacy RTLS.
We also don’t force organizations to use our BLE tags. We can simply connect 3rd party tags. In fact, any BLE-based beacon can be integrated into our software platform. BLE makes it so much easier to connect to everything – at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.
We provide a very simple-to-use system that doesn’t require a staff of IT professionals to maintain. You don’t need to be an IT person to install. Our guides and documented procedures allow facility or office managers to install – it’s that easy. Customers are up and running in less than a day.
Q: Do you have any specific goals that you want your company to achieve in the near future?
A: First goal is to help as many organizations as we can to deploy and benefit from real-time location and 24/7 monitoring solutions. It pains me to know that roughly 75% of U.S. hospitals and clinics don’t use RTLS.
Our second goal is to help organizations realize the full benefits of IoT and BLE. BLE is in nearly every wireless device, uses little power, is low-cost and super easy to implement and can be used in many location-based applications. The possibilities are endless, and that’s what excites us the most. smart position can leverage BLE beacons, personnel badges and sensors for location-aware applications in workflow optimization, employee safety, remote patient monitoring and smart homes. Yes, these solutions exist now but at what cost and complexity? With BLE and smart position, the barriers to entry come down.
For more information, visit smart-position.com.
