Airscan – Improving Road Traffic Congestion

Traffic CongestionTraffic Congestion to most people means, a motionless slow moving line of vehicles leading to driver frustration and in some cases road rage.

Congestion has many negative social, environmental and economic impacts and its one of the many challenges facing Traffic Engineers. Understanding the future demand for road travel and congestion is therefore a key requirement in being able to tackle it.

Airscan by Iknaia, is a new unique sensor monitoring solution that enables Traffic Engineers to analyse traffic queues and congestion in an efficient way and present live journey times to drivers.

Airscan monitors the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi ids in anonymous vehicles and provides real-time information about changes in traffic flows.  With Airscan installed Traffic Engineers can quickly analyse the data and identify congested areas. This will help make judgements to divert traffic to other routes and plan future roads infrastructure.

Airscan data can be presented to signs and phones to keep drivers fully informed of the impact of any incidents or diversion routes.

Julia McNally, Founder of Iknaia says “The Airscan system is able to identify, in real time, incidents that impact on journey time reliability, and what’s more it is portable and easy to install. Using the online self-service dashboard you can control all your units in one place and view real-time reporting. Data can also be exported and fully integrated into existing monitoring applications.”

Data collected by each Airscan unit is pushed to the cloud using 3G/4G connectivity and presented in real-time to an online dashboard optimised for PC, tablets and all mobile devices.  Activity reports can be viewed, and push notifications can be set up to alert key management personnel and ensure they are made aware of incidents as they occur.

Airscan is compatible with multiple third party products including variable message signs and it is also fully integrated into the Iknaia Intelligent Tracking solution to enable location monitoring of the workforce and assets.

For more information www.iknaia.co.uk/airscan

 

 

Bluetooth 4.0 helps keep Construction Sites on Track

power tunnel

Tracking Workers using Bluetooth 4.0

Knowing exactly where valuable tools and equipment are in “real time” can be key to a successful construction project, as can protecting employees in an industry where accidents and injury are an ever present danger.

RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology has been widely used for tracking tools, equipment, materials and there are numerous GPS tracking systems available to track the location of vehicles coming in and out of the jobsite.

However, the advent of a new technology, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Bluetooth 4.0, has emerged and has much wider uses to improve the ability of construction businesses to keep track of a much wider variety of assets even down to individual tools and log and monitor activities on site and to improve health and safety.

GPS doesn’t work indoors or underground and RFID offers limited communication, whereas BLE is easily deployable in a wider range of locations, it’s very low power and is a lot more flexible when it comes to converging technology, making it a more ‘Future Proof’ investment.

BLE has the capability to track and monitor workers and assets more accurately, with the added functionality of being able to integrate into legacy back end systems to send audio and content to connected mobile devices (approx. 80% of all recent mobile devices).  Adopted by IOS, Android and Windows operating systems, its low power and cost, as well as its robust and reliable communication means BLE is quickly becoming the technology of choice.

One such company, Iknaia (www.iknaiatracking.com), London, UK, has built a completely robust end to end solution combing BLE and Wi-Fi. Iknaia’s beacons present their location to their detectors in ‘real-time’. In addition the detectors can connect to mobile devices and send content specific to that device based on its proximity.

Julia McNally, Founder explains: “One of the difficult issues facing organisations planning to deploy new technologies is how they can all integrate and become completely interoperable with any existing and future technology. Iknaia’s solution offers a ‘future-proof’ IT environment. Our installation covers a wide range of solutions including full Wi-Fi mesh connectivity, offering public/corporate channels; Beacon scanning and detecting; integration with back end systems to push relevant content to connecting mobile devices.”

McNally continues, “in addition to tracking valuable assets we can control access to site areas, track workers location, check their health, send alerts to them, send content to their mobile devices and enable them to communicate back. BLE also enables us to add on so many extra features, such as payment systems, check-in applications, CCTV cameras and much more.”

Iknaia’s data is pushed into the cloud and presented on an easy to use online management console, optimised for all devices; PC, tablets and Smartphones.

With Apple and Google adopting beacon technology and developing applications using BLE, we’ll see a lot more uses for this technology in years to come.