An invisible wireless veil surrounds us these days, wherever we go. This is achieved not only by the ubiquitous cellular networks, but practically every workplace, public place, and home has a local Wi-Fi network, to which our handheld gizmos dutifully connect while they are within reach.
From the end-users’ point of view, what matters is connectivity, and there is a lot of constant activity behind the scenes making it sure that our connection does not cut off even though we move from one coverage area to another.
And for most of us, that is all that we want.
But all this vast amount of tracking and switching from network to network contains valuable information, mobility data, that most companies do not very widely use. It is a perfect example of “dark data”, or data that organizations fully own but do not utilize for anything.
Benefits of mobility data
On the basic level, we can gain information on what devices crossed our networks at what time. Even this basic information can be valuable: in shopping centers and airports it can provide an indirect indication of current customer density; in hotels, it can help to guide staff allocation between various restaurants or bars.
Thanks to the segmented structure of Wi-Fi networks, stemming from the limited distance a single access point can cover, you can have a rough understanding of where the customers reside just by calculating the connections per access point.
But you can delve into this constant flow of device management information even further: the continuous exchange of information between wireless access points and wireless devices does also provide a lot of indirect information that can be fed to intelligent algorithms. As a result, we can get a more detailed location reference on the devices on our premises.
Connect this with restricted spaces, obstacle, and access point maps, predefined movement plans and knowledge of the attainable speeds of various vehicles that roam in this area, it is possible to get valuable optimization information on actual movements. Warehouses are a good example: the real track of a performed product relocation movements can be compared against the calculated optimal route, and time/area-level hot spot maps can be generated.
The resulting mobility data can be used to optimize material placement on shelves to avoid overlapping motions, streamline the product flow in and out of the warehouse according to most common operations, and provide direct savings in terms of material hauling costs.
An expert’s help
Datumize is an expert on discovering and revealing such dark data. They have created a framework of data management tools that make it possible to turn such motion information into a valuable resource for an organization. Datumize has solutions both for industrial and commercial device tracking, from warehouses to hotels to shopping centers. With the help of this motion intelligence, many benefits are revealed for your business.
Conclusion
By gathering the motion information from existing Wi-Fi networks, the solutions provided by Datumize allow organizations to gain new insights into their customers’ and employees’ movements. And by collecting and processing the mobility data from the access points that already have been installed around organizations, the additional cost of gaining these new insights has been minimized.
