AUSTIN, Texas, February 12, 2019 – HID Global®, a worldwide leader in trusted identity solutions, today announced its new BEEKs Duress Badge Beacon that addresses the growing need to protect doctors, nurses and other caregivers from threatening situations that arise in the hospital environment. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) duress functionality provides a fast and easy way for hospital personnel to send security staff real-time distress alerts from anywhere in or around the hospital campus if they are in duress and in case of other emergencies.
Enabled by Bluvision™ (part of HID Global), the duress beacon is the latest addition to the HID Location Services IoT platform, which makes it possible to streamline and enable multiple location services applications in a unified healthcare IoT ecosystem. The BLE beacon can be used by itself or integrated into popular access control cards already in use. Staff members or clinicians just press the back of their badge to instantaneously trigger a duress alert that identifies them and their location—inside the hospital, the parking garage or other configured areas—for immediate action by security teams.
“It’s well known that an effective response system is critical to keep high-risk situations from escalating into workplace violence, but acquiring, deploying and managing yet another disparate hospital system is costly–often creating a barrier to adopting a duress solution,” said John Sailer, Chief Operating Officer of Bluvision. “HID’s new beacon and our end-to-end IoT platform enable hospitals to easily plug real-time duress detection and alerts into their healthcare IoT infrastructure. This powerful combination simplifies the process of increasing healthcare personnel safety with a solution that also requires minimal effort by the user.”
Together with HID Location Services, the new beacon can be centrally managed through the cloud to transfer new messages, send firmware updates and conduct battery status checks remotely. Its unique design allows it to broadcast reliably and with precision, even in densely populated Wi-Fi environments. The beacon simultaneously supports iBeacon (Apple), Eddystone (Google) and sBeacon (Bluvision) protocols and pinpoints the location of the user down to 6 ft (2 m).
HID’s duress badge solution with real-time location services is highly sought after beyond healthcare. The hospitality market, including restaurants and hotels, is another broad area where staff is vulnerable to workplace violence risks due of the social nature of the sector. The hotel industry has been an early adopter of duress solutions to help their room attendants feel safe on the job.
Click here to learn more about HID’s BEEKs Duress Badge Beacons and HID Location Services.
