Technical challenges
When tracking personnel or certain equipment, in addition to know their position, but it’s also important to monitor the environmental conditions as temperature, humidity and noise around these assets throughout the day. The use of an accelerometer is also useful to monitor their movements to detect if they are awake, running or walking and especially if they haven't moved in a certain time as a result of a health or safety issue.
To ensure constant communication with an IoT tracker, connectivity is an important consideration, whether it is short-range communication using NFC, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi or long-range systems such as LPWAN, NB-IoT, and LoRa.
However, in indoor situations where GNSS cannot be used, an infrastructure based on BLE technology with AoA (angle of arrival), ultrawide band (UWB) or Wi-Fi can be really useful.
ST Solutions
As a creator of unique technologies and products that provide our customers the best solutions to address their challenges and opportunities, ST offers a wide portfolio of MCUs for specific low-power task control, microphones, MEMS motion and environmental sensors with an embedded AI engine as well as image sensors, ambient light sensing (ALS) modules and time-of-flight devices which can significantly enhance the user experience.
With a complete range of low-power products for battery-operated systems, ST also offers solutions for short-range connectivity (Bluetooth Low Energy ICs and NFC or RFID modules); LPWAN, UHF, and sub-GHz modules for long-range communication; and GNSS modules for positioning.
