Contact

RTLS that reuses your
existing infrastructure.

Pole Star locates people and assets indoors in real time - on the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth network you already have. No parallel network, no rip-and-replace. Just accurate indoor location, at enterprise scale.

No new infrastructure BLE + Wi-Fi Cloud or on-premise GDPR-compliant
Book a demo See how it works
20+ years of expertise 35+ countries worldwide BLE positioning pioneer
Pole Star platform dashboard

Trusted by leading organizations across healthcare, airports, transport, maritime & industry

Client 02
Royal Caribbean
Rauland AU/NZ
Carnival Cruise Line
ONET
Northwestern Medicine
Critical Arc
HID Global
Client 11
Kehops
AP-HP
SNCF
Msheireb
Solutions

One platform, every indoor-location solution

From asset tracking to worker safety, indoor navigation and occupancy - all powered by the same real-time location engine.

Location Intelligence Platform

The real-time data layer behind every solution - positions, zones, events and analytics.

Explore

Asset & Equipment Tracking

Locate equipment, tools and mobile assets in real time - and stop searching for them.

Explore

Staff & Worker Safety

Duress alarms, lone-worker protection and geolocated emergency response.

Explore

Indoor Navigation & Wayfinding

Turn-by-turn guidance across complex sites, on visitors' own smartphones.

Explore

CO₂ Mustering

Real-time personnel verification and zone clearance before CO₂ system activation.

Explore

People & Asset Flow Analytics

Understand how people and assets actually move - dwell times, routes and bottlenecks.

Explore

Geofencing & Zone Monitoring

Trigger alerts on entry, exit or dwell in restricted and hazardous zones.

Explore

People Counting & Occupancy

Real-time occupancy and footfall by zone, floor or building.

Explore

All use cases

Browse the full library of RTLS and indoor-location use cases.

View all
Industries

Proven across the most demanding environments

The same platform runs in hospitals, senior living facilities, airports, railways, cruise ships, industrial sites, smart workplaces, smart cities and public venues - lessons from each sector improve every deployment.

Healthcare

Healthcare & Hospitals

Asset tracking, patient flow and staff duress.

Explore
Maritime

Cruise Ships

Crew safety, CO₂ mustering and guest tracking.

Explore
Airports

Airports

Baggage carts and ground equipment tracking.

Explore
Senior Living

Senior Living & Aged Care

Nurse call, wandering alerts and caregiver safety.

Explore
Rail & Metro

Rail & Metro

Wayfinding and underground worker safety.

Explore
Manufacturing

Manufacturing & Industry

Tool, WIP and equipment tracking on the plant floor.

Explore
Smart Workplace

Smart Workplace & Education

Occupancy, flow analytics and space optimization.

Explore
Smart City

Smart City

Connected public infrastructure at scale.

Explore
Public Venues

Public Venues

Indoor navigation and crowd analytics.

Explore
Who is Pole Star?

Indoor positioning & RTLS, explained

Pole Star is an indoor positioning and RTLS platform. It locates people, assets and equipment inside buildings - where GPS doesn't work - and streams that location to the applications and teams that need it, in real time. Built on Bluetooth Low Energy and Wi-Fi, running on the network you already own.

With 20+ years of expertise and deployed in 35+ countries, Pole Star turns indoor location into safety, efficiency and better experiences - across healthcare, senior living, airports, rail & metro, cruise ships, industry, smart workplace and public venues.

How a location travels through the platform

01

What is indoor positioning?

Indoor positioning determines the real-time position of people or objects inside a building, where satellite GPS is unavailable. It relies on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi to deliver reliable, room-level accuracy adapted to the environment.

02

What is an RTLS?

A real-time location system (RTLS) continuously tracks tagged assets or people within a defined area. Tags or smartphones emit signals, a location engine computes position live - powering asset tracking, safety and analytics.

03

How does the platform work?

BLE/Wi-Fi infrastructure captures signals, the positioning engine computes location, the NAO® Suite orchestrates and distributes data, and applications act on it - exposed to your systems via REST & MQTT APIs.

04

What technologies are used?

Primarily BLE and Wi-Fi positioning, fused with smartphone sensors for hybrid positioning and indoor/outdoor continuity. Delivered via smartphone SDK, BLE tags and open APIs - in the cloud or on-premise.

What Pole Star solves

Wasted time searching for equipment and assets
Slow emergency response and lone-worker risk
Visitors and patients getting lost in complex sites
No visibility on how people and assets flow
Under-used space and unknown occupancy
Costly, disruptive dedicated location networks
How the platform works

From a signal to a business decision

Six connected layers turn raw radio signals into real-time location, analytics and insight - end to end, on one platform.

Platform architecture · end-to-end data flow
Infrastructure BLE / Wi-Fi capture Positioning Engine computes position Location Services orchestrates data Applications visualize & act Analytics flow & occupancy Business insights CAPTURE → COMPUTE → ORCHESTRATE → USE → ANALYZE → DECIDE
1

Infrastructure

BLE beacons, gateways, tags and existing Wi-Fi - BLE capture signals on-site.

 2

Positioning Engine

Turns signals into a real-time position, on device or server-side.

 3

Location Services

Normalizes and distributes location across every service.

 4

Applications

Live maps, alerts and supervision dashboards.

 5

Analytics

Flow, dwell times and occupancy from historical data.
6

Business Insights

Better safety, efficiency and decisions across operations.

Technology

A multi-technology indoor location platform

Pole Star fuses multiple positioning technologies and delivers them through open, developer-friendly interfaces - hardware-agnostic and deployable your way.

Positioning technologies

BLE Positioning

Bluetooth Low Energy - the economical, universal standard for indoor location.

Wi-Fi Positioning

Locate devices using existing Wi-Fi access points and infrastructure.

Hybrid Positioning

BLE, Wi-Fi and smartphone sensors fused for accuracy and indoor/outdoor continuity.

Smartphone SDK

Turn existing smartphones into location-aware devices - no extra hardware.

Hardware & infrastructure

BLE Tags

Long-life beacons and tags for assets, equipment and people.

Existing Wi-Fi Infrastructure

Reuse Cisco, HPE Aruba, Fortinet and more - no overlay network.

Existing BLE Infrastructure

Leverage BLE-enabled access points already installed on-site.

Hardware Agnostic

Vendor-neutral by design - mix and match beacons, tags and networks.

Integration & deployment

APIs

Open REST & MQTT APIs stream location into your business systems.

SDKs

Mobile (Android/iOS) and JavaScript SDKs to build your own apps.

Cloud

SaaS deployment for rapid rollout and elastic, multi-site scale.

On-Premise

Self-hosted for full data governance, sovereignty and control.

Customer success

Trusted where it matters most

Real deployments, real results - in airports, at sea and in hospitals.

All case studies
Atalian at Paris CDG
Airports · Asset tracking

Baggage cart tracking at Paris Charles de Gaulle

Atalian needed real-time visibility of thousands of baggage carts across one of Europe's busiest airports to redistribute them where travellers actually need them.

Paris CDGCiscoBLE
  • Real-time visibility of baggage carts
  • Smart cart redistribution
  • Fewer idle and misplaced carts
Read case study
Royal Caribbean
Maritime & cruise · Child tracking

Keeping track of children onboard cruise ships

On some of the world's largest cruise ships, Royal Caribbean wanted parents and crew to locate children in real time - improving safety and the guest experience.

up to 2,000 wristbands4,000+ Cisco APs
  • Real-time child location onboard
  • Improved passenger safety
  • Enhanced guest experience
Read case study
Northwestern Medicine
Healthcare · Asset tracking

Medical asset tracking across hospital facilities

Northwestern Medicine deployed a real-time staff duress solution across 8 hospitals, enabling instant emergency alerts and indoor responder tracking.

35,000 staff badges 8 hospitals Cisco BLE
  • Real-time staff duress alerts
  • Accurate indoor responder tracking
  • Deployed across 8 hospitals without new infrastructure
Read case study
Why Pole Star

Built to deploy fast, scale far and stay compliant

The differentiators that make Pole Star the enterprise choice for indoor location and RTLS.

Infrastructure-free deployment

Go live without installing a dedicated location network.

Reuse existing infrastructure

Runs on the Wi-Fi and BLE networks you already own.

High positioning accuracy

Room-level by default, sub-metre where required.

Long battery life

Beacons and tags that last for years, not months.

Scalability

From a single site to global, multi-country rollouts.

Enterprise-grade architecture

Multi-tenant, high-throughput, mission-critical ready.

GDPR compliance

Data minimization, controlled retention, encryption.

Privacy by design

On-device options and anonymized location by default.

20+ years of expertise

Two decades of real-world RTLS deployments.

Worldwide deployments

Live across multiple countries and environments.

Multi-technology platform

BLE, Wi-Fi and hybrid positioning in one platform.

Hardware agnostic

Vendor-neutral - mix beacons, tags and networks freely.

The NAO® Suite

One suite
powers it all.

The NAO® Suite is Pole Star's complete indoor-location product family. Every capability on this page - positioning, tracking, supervision, analytics - is delivered by a connected set of products, grouped into four building blocks.

NAO® is Pole Star's indoor-location technology. Each product is modular - start with one, then scale across the suite.
Infrastructure Engine Platform Applications
Explore the NAO® Suite
Blog

Insights from the field.
Fresh from our experts.

All articles
Indoor Positioning System showing real-time location tracking of people and assets inside a modern enterprise building

Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS): The Complete Enterprise Guide for 2026

Read article →

How hospitals can reduce time lost searching for medical equipment?

Read article →

How much time do hospitals lose searching for equipment?

Read article →

FAQ

Indoor positioning & RTLS: your questions, answered

Everything you need to know about indoor location, the technologies behind it, and how Pole Star deploys.

Understanding indoor positioning & RTLS

What is indoor positioning?
Indoor positioning (also called indoor location or indoor GPS) determines the real-time position of people or objects inside a building, where satellite GPS is unavailable. It usually relies on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi to reach room-level or sub-metre accuracy.
What is a real-time location system (RTLS)?
An RTLS continuously tracks the location of tagged assets or people within a defined area. Tags or smartphones emit signals, infrastructure captures them, and a location engine computes positions live - powering asset tracking, safety and analytics.
What's the difference between indoor positioning and RTLS?
Indoor positioning is the underlying capability of locating something indoors. An RTLS is the full system - infrastructure, tags, engine and software - that applies indoor positioning to track many assets or people continuously and in real time.
How accurate is Pole Star's indoor positioning?
Accuracy depends on the environment and infrastructure density. Pole Star delivers room-level accuracy by default, with few meters precision achievable where higher accuracy is required, by reinforcing critical zones.
Does Pole Star require a new network?
No. Pole Star uses your existing Wi-Fi or Bluetooth network to connect the positioning infrastructure. BLE beacons and gateways are required to enable accurate indoor positioning, but you do not need to deploy a separate network for the solution.

Technology & infrastructure

Which networks are compatible - Cisco, HPE Aruba, Fortinet?
Yes. Pole Star runs on BLE-enabled networks from Cisco (Cisco Spaces), HPE Aruba, Fortinet, Arista, Extreme Networks and others. See Integrations & APIs and Partners.
How does BLE positioning work?
BLE positioning uses Bluetooth Low Energy signals from beacons, tags or smartphones. Infrastructure measures signal strength (RSSI), and the positioning engine converts those measurements into a real-time indoor position.
How does Wi-Fi positioning work?
Wi-Fi positioning locates devices using existing Wi-Fi access points, leveraging signal measurements from the wireless network - so buildings already covered by Wi-Fi can support indoor location without new hardware.
What is hybrid positioning?
Hybrid positioning fuses BLE, Wi-Fi and smartphone sensors (and GNSS outdoors) for greater accuracy and a seamless indoor/outdoor experience, even as conditions change across a site.
Do users need an app to be located?
It depends on the use case. For indoor navigation, a smartphone app using the Pole Star SDK locates the user on their own device. For asset tracking, BLE tags are located by the infrastructure with no app involved.

Positioning solutions & capabilities

What are BLE tags, and how long do they last?
BLE tags are small Bluetooth devices attached to assets, equipment or people. Depending on the model and configuration, Pole Star beacons and tags offer multi-year battery life.
What is indoor navigation and wayfinding?
Indoor navigation gives turn-by-turn guidance inside buildings on a smartphone, helping visitors, patients or passengers find their way across complex sites like hospitals, airports and stations.
What is asset and equipment tracking?
Asset tracking locates equipment, tools and mobile assets in real time - for example medical equipment tracking in hospitals - so teams stop searching and get more from the assets they already own.
What is geofencing?
Geofencing defines virtual zones on a map. When a tracked person or asset enters, exits or dwells in a zone, the system can trigger alerts, notifications or automated actions - useful for restricted or hazardous areas.
How does Pole Star support worker safety and lone workers?
Pole Star powers staff duress and lone-worker protection: a wearable or app button raises a geolocated alarm, and responders see the person's real-time, room-level location for faster intervention.

Industry & business use cases

What is people counting and occupancy?
People counting and occupancy measure how many people or assets are in a zone in real time - supporting capacity management, space optimization and safety, by site, floor or area.
How is Pole Star used in healthcare?
In healthcare, Pole Star powers medical equipment tracking, patient flow, staff duress and wireless nurse call - reducing search time, improving safety and freeing clinical capacity.
How is Pole Star used in airports?
In airports, Pole Star tracks baggage carts and ground equipment, enabling real-time visibility and smart redistribution across terminals - as deployed at Paris Charles de Gaulle.
How is Pole Star used in manufacturing and warehouses?
In manufacturing and logistics, Pole Star tracks tools, work-in-progress and equipment, monitors flow and improves worker safety - bringing real-time visibility to factories and warehouses.
What ROI can I expect from an RTLS deployment?
ROI typically comes from less time searching for assets, higher equipment utilization, faster emergency response and better space use. Reusing existing infrastructure also lowers the upfront cost of going live.

Privacy, deployment & scalability

Is indoor location GDPR-compliant, and how is privacy handled?
Yes. Pole Star is built with privacy by design and GDPR compliance - data minimization, controlled retention and encryption, with on-device positioning and anonymized location available for privacy-sensitive scenarios.
Can Pole Star be deployed in the cloud or on-premise?
Both. Deploy as SaaS in the cloud, on-premise for full data sovereignty, or in a hybrid model - using standard containers and APIs to fit your IT environment.
How scalable is the platform?
Pole Star scales from a single site to global, multi-country rollouts on a multi-tenant architecture that handles large real-time data volumes across many buildings and sites.
Ready when you are

Put your building on the map.

See Pole Star locate people and assets in real time - live, on the infrastructure you already have. No new network required.

Book a demo Talk to an expert
Scroll to Top