Royal Caribbean Cruise Line - Kids Tracking

Context & challenges

On board large cruise ships, ensuring child safety is a critical challenge due to the exceptional size of modern vessels, the high volume of passengers, and the complexity of indoor environments. Indeed, ships operate as floating cities, with multiple decks, public areas, activity zones and dedicated spaces for children, therefore making supervision particularly demanding.

The project covers next-generation cruise ships, including Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, and Star of the Seas. In this context, and given their unprecedented scale, traditional supervision methods are not sufficient to guarantee continuous visibility or rapid response if assistance is required.

Therefore, the objective was to deploy a real-time, scalable and highly reliable kids tracking solution, capable of operating across the entire passenger area of the ship while also complying with strict maritime and connectivity constraints.

Project scope

The deployment is designed to operate at very large scale and includes:

Up to 1,000 BLE bracelets for children per cruise
4,000+ BLE-enabled Cisco access points across passenger areas
Coverage of all passenger-accessible zones, across multiple decks
A fully on-premise architecture, adapted to maritime environments and connectivity constraints

This scope ensures consistent tracking and supervision across the full onboard experience.

Solution deployed

Pole Star implemented a kids tracking solution based on BLE wearable bracelets designed specifically for children. Each bracelet emits Bluetooth Low Energy signals that are captured by the ship’s existing BLE-enabled network infrastructure, thereby ensuring seamless integration with the onboard connectivity environment.

Using these signals, Pole Star computes the real-time indoor location of each child and displays positions on custom multi-deck maps. As a result, location data is refreshed continuously and made available only to authorized users, thus ensuring both operational efficiency and data privacy.

In addition, parents can access their child’s location directly through the passenger mobile application, providing reassurance throughout the cruise. Meanwhile, onboard teams rely on dedicated supervision interfaces to monitor situations and respond quickly whenever assistance is needed.

Pole Star architecture & solutions

The solution relies on a robust, hybrid maritime-ready location architecture combining onboard processing and cloud monitoring. The architecture can operate fully on-premises, ensuring low latency, high availability, and independence from external connectivity, with optional cloud monitoring.

Pole Star NAO® Server (Docker) acting as the onboard Location Engine, computing in real time the positions of Child BLE wristbands from raw BLE measurements collected via Cisco / HPE Aruba infrastructure.
Cisco Spaces (Local Firehose) transmitting raw BLE data to the NAO® Server for precise multi-deck indoor positioning.
Pole Star NAO® Viewer Web Application providing live visualization on customizable, branded multi-deck maps.
REST APIs supporting wristband registration and integration with cruise line systems.
Location Stream API (REST or MQTT) delivering real-time location data to guest and crew mobile applications.
Pole Star NAO® Cloud (AWS) enabling system monitoring and supervision.

NAO® Viewer – Tracking Web app

Customizable

Any attributes can be added to kids (i.e. group age, guest class, childcare staff, …) for categorization and search filtering
Colors can be customized with Cruise Line branding
Cruise Line logo can be added to the top left-hand corner

Interoperable

NAO® Viewer is highly interoperable and can be connected with Cruise Line or any 3rd party platform via API to update any tag attributes in real time (i.e. childcare staff supervising the child)

Alerting

Pop up alerting message can be configured when a child enters in or exits from a specific zone (via geofencing).

Operational capabilities

The solution provides:

Real-time localization of children across all passenger areas
Multi-deck cartographic visualization, adapted to complex ship layouts
Continuous position updates to support rapid intervention
Local processing ensuring fast response times and operational resilience
Customized user interfaces aligned with the cruise line’s branding

These capabilities allow onboard teams to maintain continuous situational awareness without impacting the passenger experience.

Operational benefits

The deployment delivers clear operational and experience benefits:

Enhanced child safety across large and complex vessels
Increased parental reassurance through direct access to location information
Improved responsiveness of onboard staff in case of assistance or incident
A highly scalable solution, capable of supporting thousands of wearables per voyage