HIMSS07, the premier Healthcare IT show, taking place this week in New Orleans, featured new WiFi-based tracking tags from AeroScout and and PanGo among other announcements.

AeroScout today announced the T3 Series, an advanced, feature-rich tag for asset and people tracking and real-time location solutions. It will build on AeroScout’s proven asset tracking with a new streamlined, flat shape, low power consumption, and advanced capabilities.

AeroScout develops complete Active RFID solutions for a range of industries, and has successfully provided high-value installations with thousands of tags to customers in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and other environments.

The new “credit card” rugged form factor easily attaches to a variety of gear, including medical devices, containers, manufacturing machinery and vehicles. It can be easily clipped onto a standard badge clip or one of several other mounting options for people tracking.

Despite the tag’s small form factor, it provides up to 4 years of battery life. AeroScout says it’s the only Wi-Fi tag to provide integrated RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) and TDOA (Time Difference of Arrival) location options for accurate location in any environment, indoors or outdoors. Unlike other Wi-Fi tags, the T3 includes a built-in “choke-point” mechanism, enabling the tag to be triggered precisely at doorways, gateways or enclosed areas.

Meanwhile PanGo today announced version 4.5 of their PanOS Platform, for managing location information across the extended enterprise. For the first time, customers can leverage location data from a variety of RFID and Real Time Location System (RTLS) sources and integrate it into enterprise applications in a unified and standards-based way.

Building on its market leading Wi-Fi and passive RFID locationing capabilities, the PanOS Platform now includes support for 802.15.4, ultra-wideband (UWB) and infrared (IR).

Customers can integrate as many of these location technologies as needs demand, cost-optimizing their deployments by blending location data from multiple technologies in a single deployment and a single view across the enterprise.

Version 4.5 of PanOS features several new out-of-the-box Location Providers – the interfaces that receive and process location data. They build on the library of location tracking technologies already supported in PanOS including integration to the Cisco 2710 Wireless Location Appliance, Application-Level Events (ALE) based passive RFID and PanGo’s own RSSI-based location technology.

The PanOS Platform is interoperable with and extensible by common technologies and standards such as J2EE, Microsoft .NET, XML, HTTP and Web services and has formed partnerships with InnerWireless, for in-building wireless systems, Multispectral Solutions, a provider of ultra wideband (UWB) systems and Versus Technology, a leader in IR-based context-aware systems used in medical and long-term care facilities.

The Wi-Fi infrastructure, says PanGo, enables both customers and developers to quickly develop pluggable solutions from virtually any location method by implementing the standardized PanOS Platform Provider Interface.

Ekahau also announced their T301-A Wi-Fi tag. Ekahau’s third generation active Wi-Fi tag can locate assets in real time using standard 802.11b/g infrastructure.

Ekahau says it’s most suitable for tracking equipment, personnel or high value assets in hospitals, manufacturing plants or in any other type of facility where knowledge of the actual and up-to-date location improves efficiency and safety.

It features a battery life up to 5 years, an intelligent motion sensor that activates the tag only when the tracked object is moving and Works in any standard 802.11 b/g wireless network infrastructure.

In other RF-ID news, C/Net reports the forthcoming national identification card will do little to thwart future terrorist attacks and instead will endanger Americans’ privacy, speakers at a conference here warned.

The digital ID card requirements, scheduled to take effect in May 2008, are likely to spark a revolt among states concerned about the complexity of the federal rules and the cost of complying with them, said Jim Babka, president of DownsizeDC.org, at the Liberty Forum conference.

“It’s going to cost the taxpayers $11 billion, an average cost of $200 million per state,” said Babka, whose organization bills itself as a “trans-partisan” effort trying to rein in the federal government.

The 2005 Real ID Act says that drivers licenses and other ID documents issued by state governments must comply with a stringent set of rules devised by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that have not yet become public. But dozens of state legislatures are debating whether to stand up to the federal government and oppose federalized IDs, a step that Maine’s legislature took in a vote last month.

DailyWireless has more on Tracking Tags: Push & Pull and GPS Tracking: In a Shoe, On a Bike.

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Posted by Sam Churchill on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 11:51 am.