The location of a tracked shopping cart in a metal scrapyard. We partnered with one of our...
In this article we will review the “finder” technologies commonly used in products like the Tile and Air Tag. The short range radio technology found in them are great for finding your car keys, however they are not the best choice for asset tracking, which enables asset protection or loss prevention investigations.
Location Method Matters:
Consumer products such as Air Tags and Tile utilize the well known Bluetooth Low Energy protocol. They leverage the ecosystem available through the ubiquitous smart phone support for Bluetooth and won’t work unless a phone is nearby because the tag relies on the phone to infer the location of the asset. In addition, since Bluetooth is a short range technology, this smart phone needs to be within 75 feet from the tag and with its location services enabled to relay the location. In short, you could say it takes two to tango: The tag location is primarily determined from the location of the phones, not the tag itself.
For Air Tags to be effective, all of the following must be true:
- The tracked asset must be within 75 feet of several iPhones.
- The nearby iPhones must have Bluetooth enabled.
- The nearby iPhones must be participating in the “Find my” network with location services turned on.
These 3 criteria severely restrict the usability of “Finder” style devices for Loss Prevention and Asset Tracking purposes. Most stolen assets aren’t being held in areas with Bluetooth enabled phones that have their tracking services enabled. The “Find my “ service that reports the info to the cloud can easily be defeated by opting out of it in the phone settings. This limits the ability of these devices to be used for anything outside of keys and pets.
Intelligent Tracking vs Finding:
DTx trackers utilize satellite-based location services such as GPS and Glonass (GNSS) which are the gold standard for determining an asset’s location with high accuracy. In addition, DTx trackers have the ability to scan its vicinity for Wi-Fi access points to determine its location. (More on this method in a future blog.) Combining these technologies with low cost cellular radios is the current standard for many forms of asset tracking found in mission critical services such as pharmaceuticals, heavy equipment, police, fire and rescue operations. The trade-off to achieving high accuracy using satellite technology is that it requires a bit more battery power than other location methods.
Offsetting this requirement, the DTx tracker is designed to optimize the use of battery during location services by carefully scheduling GPS fixes to optimize battery utilization. The intelligent scheduling significantly increases the battery life. The DTx can also infer its location by scanning the nearby Wi-Fi access point SSIDs using their signal strength to determine a position. This method is more power-efficient than GPS and can be effective in urban settings when there is a high density of Wi-Fi networks. The DTx tracker can achieve 3 + years of battery life using these intelligent scheduling features and combining GPS + Wi-Fi location methods. Bluetooth tags rarely exceed a year of battery life. Bluetooth tags generally do not come equipped with replacement batteries, our DTx tracker series uses replaceable AA batteries. This means you will buy a device once and only spend minimally every 3-4 years to replace batteries. In that span of time, you may need to buy 3 or 4 Bluetooth tags just to track the same asset.
Other Benefits to Tracking vs Finding:
Because Store Technology Group offers a full software solution through QuickTrack with our DTx series trackers, you are not limited to viewing only the current location of an asset.
- “Find My” Tags: Offer no support for geofencing or location ‘bread crumb’ history. You see your asset’s location based on where it was last scene be the last enabled smart phone near it.
- DTx Tracker: STGs QuickTrack platform records the location data with time stamped coordinates to create a breadcrumb trail and record each asset's location history. Additional data such as temperature can be added as well. For Loss Prevention, this is invaluable as you can determine all of the points of interest that a stolen asset visited, not just its current location. Temperature data can be used to infer an indoor or outdoor location.
The QuickTrack platform also allows you to pull in other data sources and easily import data into other platforms. If you need to tie location data of carts to time stamped camera footage, QuickTrack supports that. This allows for comprehensive loss prevention analysis and investigations to occur more efficiently and with greater success rates.
