SAN FRANCISCO—Orion Labs is aiming to protect lone workers with a new integration designed to pinpoint locations in GPS-deprived environments.
“Foundationally, hospitality organizations adopt Orion to solve team communication challenges—often replacing ineffective radios, or increasing the functionality and utilization of smart devices that were bought for other purposes, such as for work order management systems,” said Greg Albrecht, CTO and co-founder of Orion Labs Inc. “Orion already provides GPS-based location capabilities as standard. To enable hotels to provide the best possible guest experience, Orion now offers enhanced 3D indoor location, to ensure all members of the team are working well together.”
The new integration with Polaris Wireless enables team members to share pinpoint locations in GPS-deprived environments.
“With 3D location tracking, hospitality teams can easily pinpoint where their guest service workers are located and identify the right team member for faster guest response for tasks like bringing up clean towels to a guest, fixing a TV or lightbulb in a guestroom, or clearing trays and carts,” he said.
The solution aims to protect lone workers. “When you combine floor-level/room-level location accuracy with a service like Orion’s Emergency AI Workflow, when lone workers call for help, security teams can rapidly dispatch assistance without the lone worker needing to explain their location,” Albrecht said. “This is the same kind of technology that first responders are now adopting to accurately and rapidly locate 911 callers facing life-threatening situations.”
One of the challenges Orion faced when developing its 3D location solution was the need for accurate, detailed 3D renderings of the physical buildings themselves.
“Further, there is a mapping process to allow for precise data points to be leveraged within the Orion platform—both in real-time for constant 3D location tracking as well as instant pinpointing during panic situations,” he said. “For most buildings, this has never been done before and is often an arduous task for the industry to solve. However, with Orion’s approach—together with our chosen technology partners—it’s a very simple task that can be completed even by the hotel staff at the time of setup. After that, it’s extremely simple to set up teams within the Orion System with a 3D view of their property that they can use.”
More than 50 locations are already using Orion’s standard GPS-based real-time location capabilities; however, the latest integration is still being tested at various locations. “Orion’s enhanced 3D indoor location offering is brand new with test deployments completed in Las Vegas and San Francisco as well as others currently in the planning stages,” he said. “Hotels of any size can start using this technology today with their own properties.”
Orion plans to bring its LTE-connected push-to-talk wearable Orion Sync to the market later this year.
“Orion is constantly developing new capabilities based on the demands of the industries we serve,” Albrecht said. “New devices that are purpose-built to get the most of our platform are always in development.”
