Ekahau Inc., a worldwide leader in high performance Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems, has just introduced three new wireless temperature and humidity sensor tags that provide an automated way to measure, monitor and manage areas where changes in the environment could be harmful.
The tags are designed to assist with regulatory compliance and improve operations in a number of industries, including healthcare, retail, manufacturing and hospitality.
The Ekahau tags are wireless and battery powered which makes their configuration easy and so they can be deployed in various environments without having to run expensive cabling for power and connectivity. The tags have a battery life of up to three years when set at a 15-minute reporting interval, and are capable of sampling temperature and/or humidity every 15 seconds or as required for the specific application. On-board heuristics enable the tag to immediately report anomalies if they occur between reporting intervals.
"The flexibility of the Ekahau RTLS solution is further underscored by the applications made possible with our new temperature and humidity sensing tags," said Arttu Huhtiniemi, vice president of Product Management at Ekahau. "Not only can our solutions enable the existing Wi-Fi network to do tracking of critical assets and people, we can further leverage an organization's network infrastructure to ensure that proper temperature and humidity ranges are maintained with our wireless sensors. By improving the ROI of the Wi-Fi network and eliminating costly cabling requirements of wired applications, Ekahau's temperature and humidity monitoring tags lower the cost of remote monitoring of environmentally sensitive areas."
Unlike competing solutions on the market, Ekahau's two new temperature sensor tags - the TS1 and TS2 - have extended cable probes that can be installed inside the environment where temperature is being measured, such as a freezer or refrigerator. The TS1 tag has a single probe, while the TS2 is a dual-probe tag. Depending on the probe used, the tags' temperature range is from -200 degrees to +150 degrees Celsius (-328 degrees to +302 degrees Fahrenheit).
The HS1 humidity sensor tag includes on-board sensors that measure relative humidity (RH) ranging up to 100 percent, and temperature ranges of -40 degrees to +85 degrees Celsius (-40 degrees to +185 degrees Fahrenheit).
The TS1, TS2 and HS1 tags all offer audible and visual alarm indicators on the tags themselves and allow for programmable alarm limits and local data logging. With continuous data logging, the measurement data will not be lost even in the event of a network outage. All the sensor tags also incorporate the ability for the sensors to receive acknowledgments from the Ekahau servers and a smart re-try capability in case of data transmission failures.
Ekahau will be displaying and demonstrating these new tags at Booth 3701 during HIMSS11 Annual Conference & Exhibition, February 20-24, 2011, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.
The TS1, TS2 and HS1 tags are now available.
Ekahau's customers, including several Fortune 500 companies worldwide, are realizing the benefits of Wi-Fi based location services and innovative Wi-Fi network planning and optimization tools. Ekahau's solutions are being used in more than 300 hospitals around the world, as well as by manufacturing, retail and industrial companies, government agencies and the military. Ekahau partners include wireless software developers, leading system integrators and international OEM partners, who develop and market wireless enterprise applications. Ekahau is a U.S.-based corporation, with headquarters in Reston, Va., and other offices in Saratoga, Calif.; Helsinki, Finland; Tokyo; and Hong Kong.