Northwestern Medicine - Mobile staff duress and responder tracking
Context & challenges
This project takes place within Northwestern Medicine, a large hospital network operating multiple healthcare facilities. The deployment spans 8 hospitals, each with different layouts, scales, and operational constraints.
In such complex healthcare environments, staff safety is a major concern. Medical personnel may face aggressive behavior or emergency situations where they must be able to trigger an alert instantly and be accurately located indoors to enable rapid response.
The key challenge was to deploy a reliable, real-time staff duress solution across multiple hospitals, capable of supporting mobile staff and large volumes of users, while leveraging the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure already deployed across the sites.
Project scope
The project covers the full hospital network and includes:
Deployment across 8 hospitals
Mobile staff duress and responder tracking
35,000 staff badges equipped with an emergency alert button
Use of thousands of BLE-enabled Wi-Fi access points, including Cisco Catalyst 9130 APs
Integration with an established staff safety platform
Solution deployed
The staff duress solution is powered by Pole Star indoor location technologies, combined with the hospital’s existing network infrastructure.
Healthcare staff can trigger an alert using either mobile devices or dedicated BLE-enabled badges. When an alert is activated, BLE signals are captured by the existing Wi-Fi access points and processed to determine the real-time indoor location of the staff member.
Alerts and location data are immediately transmitted to response teams, ensuring fast situational awareness and efficient coordination during critical incidents.
Pole Star architecture & solutions
The solution relies on Pole Star’s indoor location platform and partner technologies:
NAO® Mobile for smartphone-based indoor localization and mobile staff duress
NAO® Track NG for real-time indoor positioning and alert management
Continuous exploitation of BLE signals emitted by staff badges
Integration with Cisco Spaces and Cisco Wi-Fi infrastructure
Real-time APIs for interoperability with third-party staff safety platforms such as CriticalArc
This architecture enables scalable deployment across multiple hospital sites, even with varying infrastructure densities.
Operational benefits
The deployment delivers clear operational and safety benefits:
Faster response times thanks to real-time alerting and indoor localization
Improved protection for healthcare staff across all hospital sites
Large-scale coverage without major infrastructure changes
Seamless interoperability with existing staff duress and safety systems
A future-proof architecture capable of supporting tens of thousands of users
Partners
