By Erin Register
Kontakt.io was established in 2013 as a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) hardware company to help retailers push location aware, contextual information to consumers on their mobile phones. Kontakt.io has deployed over three million beacons worldwide since then.
Kontakt.io Head of Healthcare Practice Kapil Asher said, “Many vendors in the space tried to use BLE beacons for traditional asset tracking in health care but fell short because of lack of an enterprise strategy. Kontakt.io saw this as an opportunity and strategized a robust plan that included developing specialized hardware products, a self-learning location engine plus a web-based end-user interface that included maps, reports, events and notifications. Combining the product strategy with some key partnerships helped in commercializing a turn-key solution for this market. Geared specifically to target the HTM use cases, we have also developed integrations with major CMMS and cybersecurity platforms for seamless workflows.”
TechNation learned more about Kontakt.io in a recent interview.
Q: What is the main focus of Kontakt.io?
A: Kontakt.io’s mission is to provide better location visibility into people and valuable physical assets to create meaningful insights, efficient health systems and lessen waste. We achieve our mission using cutting-edge technology that follows design principles of consumer IoT products with an enterprise grade robustness in mind. We believe that customer satisfaction is the most important deliverable of any product and is achieved only if it is a) easy to use, b) easy to maintain, c) has a quick time-to-value.
Q: What services does Kontakt.io provide?
A: Kontakt.io offers a long-awaited breakthrough in indoor location solutions. Our open source, easy-to-install, Wi-Fi network agnostic, cloud-managed, completely wireless devices provide IR-based 100% room-level location accuracy of medical devices, staff and patients. These devices, called the Portal Beam, enable asset management and utilization use cases such as device search for preventative maintenance, PAR level management, loss prevention, bed and wheelchair management and can scale into other offerings, such as staff duress, patient elopement and temperature monitoring. We also offer location services without any infrastructure for simpler use cases over BLE-enabled wireless access points.
Kontakt.io has taken indoor IoT to the next level by offering holistic visibility into a physical space by monitoring six major environmental conditions including human occupancy, temperature, humidity, air quality, light and smoke detection all within the Portal Beam.
Q: How does Kontakt.io stand out in the indoor location services field?
A: Kontakt.io outperforms traditional location services companies in two major attributes — cost and ease of use; without compromising performance in target use cases. Installing our devices requires no cable pulls, fingerprinting or onsite surveying. Our average tag price is less than 50% of leading indoor location service providers, and since our solution is entirely cloud hosted, the hospital saves on server provisioning and maintenance as well. In addition, the Portal Beam uniquely offers ambient awareness data that can be streamed to a number of HTM and facility management systems enabling real-time decision making in resource and cost optimization.
Q: Do you have any specific goals that you want Kontakt.io to achieve in the near future?
A: The next two years are going to be an exciting time for Kontakt.io. We have a number of live deployments in the North American and European markets and strive to accelerate our growth with additional strategic partnerships that provide unmatched value to our customers.
We have a robust platform roadmap over two to five years that will continually improve performance and react to change in market requirements at a lightning speed. We will be the transformative force that modernizes indoor location services and opens up opportunities to use cases that were either limited by technology or cost; thus far.
For more information, visit https://kontakt.io/solutions-healthcare/ or email k.asher@kontakt.io.
