HEALTHCARE
Improving staff safety, patient experience and operational efficiency in complex healthcare environments
Hospitals, healthcare campuses and senior living facilities operate in highly complex and sensitive environments. Ensuring staff safety, operational efficiency and patient experience requires real-time indoor location services that are accurate and reliable. Pole Star supports healthcare organizations worldwide with mission-critical indoor location solutions, designed to integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure and scale across large, multi-building facilities.
Healthcare challenges we address
Healthcare facilities face recurring operational and safety challenges:
- Staff safety in high-risk situations, including aggression, stress or isolation
- Slow response times when alerts lack precise location information
- Difficulty locating medical equipment, leading to time loss and underutilization
- Complex indoor environments that are hard to navigate for patients and visitors
- Fragmented systems, with limited interoperability between location, safety and clinical tools
Pole Star’s indoor location platform addresses these challenges by delivering real-time visibility of people, assets and movements, across all areas of a healthcare facility.
What Pole Star enables in Healthcare
Staff duress & safety
Pole Star enables healthcare staff to trigger emergency alerts via badges or smartphones, with room-level indoor localization. Alerts are transmitted in real time to security or response teams, significantly reducing intervention time and improving staff protection — even in large, multi-floor hospital campuses.
These solutions scale from individual buildings to large hospital networks, as demonstrated by deployments across pediatric hospitals and major healthcare systems such as Northwestern Medicine.
Mobile staff duress
By leveraging smartphones already used by healthcare professionals, Pole Star provides mobile staff duress without additional heavy hardware.
This approach is particularly effective for mobile teams, night staff and large campuses, while remaining fully interoperable with existing safety systems and Wi-Fi infrastructure from vendors such as HPE Aruba or Cisco.
Wireless nurse call & resident safety
Pole Star enables wireless nurse call solutions, allowing residents or patients to trigger assistance requests without fixed cabling. Calls are geolocated in real time, enabling caregivers to respond faster and prioritize interventions.
In senior living and aged care facilities, Pole Star also supports resident wandering detection, combining indoor location and geofencing to improve resident safety while preserving freedom of movement.
Asset tracking & equipment visibility
Medical equipment such as beds, wheelchairs or pumps can be tracked in real time using BLE tags.
Pole Star provides instant visibility on asset location, helping healthcare staff:
- reduce time spent searching for equipment,
- improve utilization rates,
- support maintenance and logistics workflows.
This capability is especially valuable in large hospitals and multi-site healthcare networks.
Patient & visitor wayfinding
Navigating hospitals can be stressful for patients and visitors. Pole Star’s indoor wayfinding solutions enable real-time navigation inside complex healthcare buildings, including accessible routes for people with reduced mobility.
Deployed at scale through partners such as Connexient, these solutions have demonstrated measurable benefits, including reduced missed appointments and improved patient satisfaction.
A scalable, interoperable healthcare platform
Pole Star’s healthcare solutions are built on a modular platform combining:
- NAO® Track for real-time location of people and assets
- NAO® Mobile SDK for smartphone-based location and safety
- NAO® Viewer for real-time supervision, alerts and analytics
- BLE infrastructure leveraging existing Wi-Fi and beacon deployments
The platform integrates with third-party systems and supports cloud, on-premise or hybrid architectures, meeting healthcare IT and data governance requirements.
