MEDICAL ELECTRONICS
Emanate Wireless and Silicon Labs’ machine learning open the door to affordable, clinical-grade RTLS for hospitals of all sizes
Challenge
Effective indoor location tracking has been deliver in environments where accuracy is critical. Hospitals in particular have sought out cost-effective ways to achieve clinical-grade room-level accuracy in real-time location services without the prohibitive costs and complexity of legacy systems.
Solution
Emanate Wireless enlisted Silicon Labs and the MG26 Multiprotocol Wireless SoC to build a battery-powered, AI-enabled Bluetooth doorway chokepoint system that delivers 99.9 per cent room-level accuracy at a fraction of traditional costs.
Results
The collaboration has unlocked scalable, affordable Real-Time Locationing System (RTLS) adoption, reducing infrastructure costs from more than $1,000 per room to just $100, delivering savings of more than 85 per cent and opening the door to new automation opportunities across healthcare. Hospitals and other healthcare providers are constantly struggling with the pressure to deliver better health outcomes with fewer resources. Margins are thin, budgets are
shrinking and staff satisfaction is challenged Without more time or money to throw at these issues, administrators are increasingly without compromising patient care.
healthcare operations hospitals track staff, patients and equipment. From infusion pumps to portable monitors, there may be dozens of items in patient rooms that have to be available at exactly the right moment. When assets are misplaced or time is wasted and care suffers. In fact, hospital staff spend an average of one hour per shift just locating supplies and equipment. Real-time location services (RTLS) promised to transform these processes with automated tracking that delivered room-level accuracy. But until now, the technology has been out of reach for most hospitals.
Traditional RTLS solutions were built on proprietary protocols and infrastructure- heavy deployments. These systems required extensive cabling, dedicated receivers and specialised tags, driving hardware costs. Installation was just as burdensome,
requiring dense receiver grids and meticulous calibration to maintain even modest accuracy.
As a result, only about a quarter of hospitals can afford these systems. Even then, accuracy often fell short, with systems reporting location data within a few feet at best. In healthcare, that margin is unacceptable. If a nurse’s badge is off by just a few feet, a system might incorrectly record them in a hallway instead of a patient’s room, undermining compliance, reporting and ultimately, patient trust.
Emanate wireless breaks through with Radio Vision
Emanate Wireless set out to solve this problem and pioneered a new approach with its Radio Vision solution. RadioVision is powered by Silicon Labs’ MG26 Bluetooth SoC, which features a matrix vector processor (MVP) for AI/ML acceleration. Instead of relying on dense receiver grids, Radio Vision includes a compact, battery-powered device located at the doorway of each room. This creates out of the room is naturally limited, making it possible to determine whether a tag crossed into or out of a room. The system delivers 99.9 per cent room-level accuracy, matching the needs of clinical environments. At the core of this breakthrough is a proprietary machine- learning algorithm that analyses continuous signal data to accurately identify a path of travel through the doorway. Crucially, the cost per room dropped from more than $1,000 to
38 APRIL 2026 | ELECTRONICS FOR ENGINEERS
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