Introducing Portal Light & Location Services to Bridge the IoT Connection Gap

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology has been expanding its footprint in indoor IoT and Location Service applications, especially in healthcare and corporate offices. It has largely replaced legacy wireless standards due to its low cost, open protocol, and scalability. Yet, many Wifi Access Point infrastructure providers are still not yet BLE-compliant, don’t support cloud-to-device communications and or the density of their deployed infrastructure does not allow for room-level accuracy. The introduction of Kontakt.io’s new Portal Light, an affordable, plug-and-play BLE gateway with a Wifi-backhaul allows customers to address these problems and bridge the period before the network is due to be upgraded. 

• Meet Portal Light
• Using Portal Light in Your Industry
• Enabling Kontakt.io Location Services and Site Monitoring

  Looking for an affordable and robust BLE gateway to achieve better room-level accuracy?
  Order Portal Light now.

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  It’s accelerating the adoption of indoor IoT and location use-cases through infrastructure simplification and thus reduces the barriers to entry for a variety of use cases, including COVID-19 contract tracing, building occupancy management or IV-Pump PAR management. 

  Meet Portal Light

  Bringing more than just IoT connectivity
  Kontakt.io, on its mission to streamline indoor location services today, is introducing Portal Light, a next-generation BLE gateway that brings much more than just IoT connectivity and location data across BLE spectrums. As part of our commitment to our customers and partners, we aim to close the IoT connection gap while striving to encourage others to innovate by leveraging the infrastructure they already have in place, allowing them to create value within days with Kontakt.io products. The Portal Light brings awareness of the environment at the single room level, enabling software access to a much richer dataset of the indoor workplace environment and helping Kontakt.io partners and customers to deliver more location-accurate solutions. 
  - Enabling location services: Retrieve location data of moving BLE tags and badges from the Portal Light or use the Portal Light to augment your existing BLE-enabled access point infrastructure for better accuracy.
  - Real-time device management and site monitoring: Stay up-to-date and remote monitor your BLE beacon and tag battery and location information in real-time across multiple locations, independent of mobile phones. In addition, allow for OTA firmware updates. 
  - Simplified deployment: No extra installation equipment needed. Easily deploy your Portal Light by plugging it into a power socket. Get it up and running in minutes.
  

  Using Portal Light in Your Industry

  Portal Light's versatility allows it to adapt to the needs of different industries. The value it brings is clearly highlighted in healthcare, where it powers location services that improve the patient experience while reducing operating costs and capital expenses. Other benefits of Portal Light can be seen in smart buildings and manufacturing operations, where information flows between people, buildings, and things drive a long list of use cases and create new efficiencies. See which solutions can be now empowered with Portal Light:

  Healthcare
  

  • Nurse call
  • Staff distress 
  • Hand sanitation 
  • OR workflows
  • Asset management 
  • Temperature & environmental monitoring
    

  Smart Buildings
  

  • Mustering & evacuation
  • Building occupancy
  • Room-level occupancy
  • Meeting room occupancy & auto-release
  • Visitor tracking
  • Visitor & host pairing 
  • Site time & attendance

  Manufacturing
  

  • Employee distress 
  • Employee workflows 
  • Employee contact tracing & safety 
  • Automated employee time tracking 
  • Order & material traceability 
  • Asset tracking

  
  

  Enabling Kontakt.io Location Services and Site Monitoring

  

  In addition to Portal Light launch, Kontakt.io is announcing today the extension to its software offering with an updated Kontakt.io Location Services and Device Management subscription offering including:

  Location Engine & Streams 

  Providing real-time information about the location of detected devices within the range receivers.

  • Retrieve processed location streams from Kontakt.io and third-party gateways including
    • Raw presence streams per gateway
    • Best-Gateway-processed location data
    • XY-Coordinates
  • Select the modification of the location engine set-up including time aggregation intervals

  Condition Monitoring & Telemetry Streams

  Providing real-time information about the health and sensor data of your devices.

  • Retrieve raw telemetry data from the gateways including from Kontakt.io Telemetry Packet
  • Retrieve device and cloud processed telemetry data from the device in the form of an event stream 
  • Allow creating simple firmware rules on what events should exist and when they should be triggered by e.g. writing thresholds to temperature or the gyroscope.

  Device Management & Site Monitoring

  Helping you to reduce time to market and ongoing engineering costs of Bluetooth device management services.
  Onboarding: 

  • Automatically onboard and register Kontakt.io Firmware devices and Gateway to the Kontakt.io Cloud in one-to-many logic 
  • Manually onboard and register third party devices and Gateways to the Kontakt.io Cloud by entering data manually
  • Retrieve API keys in the Kontakt.io Panel for integration and pulling deployment and location sites to other systems

  Provisioning: 

  • Change and update both open and proprietary firmware packets OTA for deployed devices in the field or before they are deployed
  • Create new device configurations in bulk or independently via the Kontakt.io Panel, the API, the App or a CSV file import 
  • Change configs of open packets for Eddystone and iBeacon, including TX Power & Interval

  Management: 

  • Group devices and Gateways as per location typology 
  • Manage and create user access rights for devices
  • Assign meta tags to devices and locations
  • Create automated support tickets for Kontakt.io support and sales in case the batteries of the devices run low.

  Security: 

  • Prevent man-in-the-middle attacks
  • Prevent device hijacking via secure end-to-end communications between Gateways, Mobile Phones, and devices
  • Prevent piggybacking via securely shuffling iBeacon identifier and Mac addresses on custom intervals
  • Device crack prevention and wiping device memory if an attack is identified

  Site Monitoring:

  • Set up monitoring rules for users and location including not-seen, removed or low on battery devices 
  • Retrieve notification and weekly updates via email, SMS on in the Panel if there are any infrastructure issues on a given site, including beacons or tags that are removed, have not been seen or run out of battery
  • See and manage notification history, including leaving comments and notes for coworkers
  • View locations in a map view and get visual feedback from Gateways, beacons, and tags
  • Monitor network traffic and uptime going through the gateways

  All this and more can now be accessible through Portal Light. Kontakt.io Location Services will enable your solution to become location-aware by consuming presence and best-gateway-based locations, helping you to build and launch faster IoT & location solutions thanks to scalable Webhooks, Kinesis stream, or RESTful API. With Portal Light and Kontakt.io software products, you can now tap into the value of location services easier, in a more affordable way, while bridging the IoT connection gap before your WiFi access points become BLE-compliant. With Kontakt.io you are closer than you think to driving business outcomes from the infrastructure you already have in place. Get your first Portal Light to see for yourself.