Breaking the Infrastructure Barrier: Wi-Fi-Based Indoor Location for Hospitals

The Promise of RTLS in Healthcare

Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) are touted as game-changers in healthcare. They promise to improve patient safety, streamline workflows, track expensive mobile equipment, and enable rapid response in emergencies. But despite their proven benefits, RTLS solutions have struggled to scale meaningfully across hospital systems.

Why? One word: infrastructure.

Why RTLS Struggles to Scale in Hospitals

While industries like manufacturing and logistics have embraced RTLS on a scale, hospitals are a different story. Many health systems launch pilot programs—tracking infusion pumps, stretchers, or even staff badges—but abandon or limit expansion. The issue isn’t the value of RTLS. It’s the implementation.

RTLS in hospitals often means mounting sensors, readers, or beacons throughout the facility. That brings construction, rewiring, IT approvals, and workflow disruptions—barriers that hospitals can’t afford during normal operations, let alone during crises.

Unique Infrastructure Challenges in Hospitals

Hospitals aren’t just more regulated, they’re more delicate, more dynamic, and less predictable than any industrial setting. Here's why conventional RTLS infrastructure doesn't fit:

1. Sterile and Regulated Zones

Installing hardware in ICUs or ORs may require infection control signoff, air filtration shutdowns, or equipment sterilization—all for a single sensor. In many cases, the disruption outweighs the benefit.

2. Constant Environmental Change

Departments shift. Rooms are reconfigured. New medical devices are introduced. Fixed infrastructure becomes obsolete faster than expected, requiring recalibration and re-approval.

3. EMI Sensitivity and Biomedical Approvals

Hospitals contain devices that are vulnerable to radio interference. Any new RTLS layer—be it BLE, UWB, or active RFID—needs vetting by biomedical engineering teams. This adds months, sometimes years, to the deployment cycle.

4. Fragmented Architecture

Multiple wings, basements, stairwells, tunnels, and lead-lined imaging rooms create signal dead zones. Achieving complete coverage is expensive and, in many cases, physically impossible with traditional infrastructure.

5. IT Complexity and Privacy

Hospital IT teams are burdened by cybersecurity requirements, device authentication, and HIPAA/GDPR compliance. Adding yet another network-connected system requires coordination across departments—and often pushbacks.

6. Unforgiving Clinical Workflows

Nurses won’t stop mid-round to recharge a tag. Physicians won’t tolerate ceiling clutter. Solutions that demand behavioral change fail in high-pressure clinical environments.

The Hidden Cost of Infrastructure

Traditional RTLS deployments often come with a substantial, and frequently underestimated, infrastructure burden. Beyond the initial expense of anchors, gateways, and dedicated readers, there’s the added cost of running power and network cabling across facilities that were never designed for this type of integration. Installation can require drilling into sterile or restricted areas, triggering infection control protocols, facility access restrictions, and workflow disruptions. These installations aren’t one-and-done either—they often require periodic recalibration, software updates, and physical maintenance. Compliance reviews and IT approvals introduce further delays and administrative overhead. Together, these hidden costs erode the expected ROI, turning what should be a scalable tracking solution into a costly, high-touch project that many hospitals or facilities abandon after limited rollout.

Rethinking RTLS: Infrastructure-Free by Design

Deeyook offers a fundamentally different approach to asset tracking, leveraging existing Wi-Fi networks with our patented interferometry technology. This breakthrough enables precise, sub-meter location accuracy, indoors and outdoors, without the cost and complexity of proprietary infrastructure. We deliver unparalleled scalability and seamless visibility across diverse and traditionally challenging environments such as hospitals.

We believe that hospitals shouldn’t have to compromise. RTLS should be:

Seamless to deploy

Non-intrusive

Scalable across the entire facility

Powered by existing infrastructure

No anchors. No beacons. No rewiring. Just software—and sub-meter accuracy from day one.

Making RTLS Truly Hospital-Ready

Hospitals need visibility. But they don’t need complexity. If we want RTLS to scale across healthcare, we must eliminate the infrastructure burden.

With Deeyook, you can finally bring location intelligence to every floor, every wing, and every caregiver—without disrupting the care.

👉 Learn more about our RTLS for healthcare