- The AI-based location data company bought Cox Prosight, a hospital RTLS software provider that serves all location tracking applications on a single platform
- The acquisition will provide a full-stack solution that includes RTLS hardware, AI to manage raw data, and a “single pane of glass” software platform for everything from asset tracking to hand hygiene
Cognosos has acquired health care real-time location system (RTLS ) technology company Cox Prosight that to bring their software platform and RTLS services to Cognosos’ AI-based location technology offering. Both companies are based in Atlanta and will consolidate their offices.
The company purchase enables Cognosos to sell full solutions that cover all healthcare applications that leverage RTLS data—including staff duress, security, asset management, patient tracking, hand hygiene and environmental monitoring for temperature sensitive products.
Cognosos already offers an AI-based RTLS solution for two applications—finish vehicle logistics and health care. Braxton Jarratt, CEO of Cognosos, explained the Cox Prosight acquisition serves as an expansion in health care, while the company will continue its existing presence in vehicle logistics and yard management.
Expanding Healthcare Market
In fact, Cognosos has offered solutions for vehicle management for about a decade and entered the hospital market about two years ago.
RTLS technology in health care offers hospitals the benefits of a view into assets, or staff members, throughout the facility. But roll-outs have still been limited, due to some key challenges, said Jarratt. He pointed to the high cost and deployment challenges around wiring a hospital and installing a network of beacons and tags.
The company has been providing its own RTLS system, first for asset management, and more recently for staff duress and safety purposes in hospitals around the U.S. Some of its customers had been seeking a more universal software platform to provide a single pane of glass through which they could access data for yet more applications, Jarratt said.
BLE Leveraging AI and Machine Learning
Cognosos’ “LocationAI”-based solution employs Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity which eliminates the wiring demands and costs, with AI and machine learning to provide more granular location data.
Its Bluetooth beacons and a gateway to capture and forward data regarding BLE-tagged assets and their movements, along with the AI and ML, can help pinpoint a tagged items or person’s location, as well as understand the context around that location for analysis and trends.
Over time and usage, the AI and ML functions apply intelligence to further detect and understand location patterns, and thereby use those patterns to better indicate where assets are located.
Cox Prosight’s Full Software Platform
Cox Prosight’s solutions are used for staff safety, environmental monitoring, asset tracking and patient experience. The company launched about five years ago with a mission to build the best new software platform in the RTLS space that accommodate all RTLS applications as well as data from different vendors hardware vendors, Jarratt said.
“So they said ‘let’s build this software application layer that will work with all sorts of different hardware sensors’,” Jarratt said.
Cognosos officials agreed that the solutions from Cox Prosight was the best software platform for healthcare RTLS, and “when you put that together with our hardware then you really get the best of both worlds,” Jarratt added.
Technology Agnostic, Full Stack Solution
Cognosos will be able to offer a solution that supports a variety of other RTLS hardware, the company reports, so that hospitals with a legacy system in place could apply Cognosos’ AI to their existing raw data viewed on the Cox Prosight platform.
The company can now offer the software layer on top of existing RTLS systems hospitals have in place and provide the AI technology as well.
AI technology can manage data from any location generating to build more details about the location of a tag, while providing more specific reporting and analytics over time, according to Cognosos officials.
Future Benefits of AI
As data continues to be collected from beaconing tags, Jarratt said “we can do really interesting things with AI… basically any raw data signal that that you can put into a machine learning program we can train it to understand it.”
Cognosos envisions adding capabilities for customers in the full stack solution to not only solve initial problems, but add features over time that can improve patient care, staff safety, efficiency, and optimize asset management.
One example could be nurse call cancellations based on the response to patient requests in a specific nurse’s vicinity. The system could identify when the call is being addressed and stop the request, for instance.
Existing Customers Adopting Cox Prosight Platform
Cognosos intends to transition all its healthcare customers to the Cox Prosight, cloud-based platform over the next several months and he expects the transition to take place quickly.
The Prosight software already was designed to manage data from multiple technology systems feeding into it, “so you can imagine that integration with us is incredibly easy,” Jarratt said.
That data will be enhanced with AI on the on the location side and AI on that data analytics side, he added, and over time if they wanted to expand the sensor network, Cognosos could provide its own BLE hardware to enhance coverage of an area as well.