PinPoint: Badge Tracking System

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PinPoint: Badge Tracking System

System Specification

Team H

Macleod, Brian R ([email protected]) Marcus, Kyle ([email protected]) Partyka, Kevin M ([email protected])

Sanchez, Jesus ( [email protected]) Wetter, Brian M ([email protected])

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1. Introduction

The Center for Handicapped Children (CHC) strives to improve the quality of life of children with disabilities by providing a wide range of educational and therapeutic services. The CHC (henceforth referred to as the client) employs teachers and therapists (henceforth referred to as practitioners) who are trained in one or more of a number of varied special education fields, such as speech therapy, physical therapy, special education etc. Every disabled child is unique and requires a customized and comprehensive program to address his or her needs. Furthermore, the regimen for a given child could involve multiple practitioners – for e.g. a child with autism might require a wide range of therapies such as speech and language therapy, behavior therapy, occupational therapy in addition to sustained special education and job skills training. The practitioners at CHC work with physicians, primary health care providers and parents to develop an education and training program tailored specifically to the needs of a given child.

The execution of the program is a collaborative process amongst all the practitioners involved and the parents. A program consists of a schedule of therapies and special education sessions to be administered and each session must be closely monitored to ensure correct delivery. An essential part of this monitoring process is determining accurately the time spent during a given session. Currently, the practitioners administrating the session are required to submit a time-sheet at the end of each session, indicating the time spent. In addition to expending valuable time of practitioners, this practice has resulted in inaccuracies in some cases, which in-turn adversely affects the overall program and has also caused errors in billing and other reporting functions.

Therefore, the client desires a solution to accurately and automatically track the time spent at a given location during a given session between practitioners and students. The CHC has rooms that are dedicated to a specific activity – for e.g. there are speech therapy rooms, physical therapy rooms and special education classrooms etc. The system should accurately capture the time spent by personnel (practitioners and staff) and the students in each room on a given day. Additionally, the system must also automatically identify the personnel and students without requiring a manual sign-in and sign-out, as is the case currently. This session activity information must be stored and be amenable to be used to generate a number of reports that are regularly issued by the CHC, such as billing reports, child-progress reports etc.

Another aspect of working with disabled children is to ensure safety and security of the children in the facility at all times. A disabled child may be incapable of comprehending safety instructions during emergency situations such as a gas-leak or fire or be unable to effectively respond to these situations by following the instructions. For example, a mentally disabled child may not understand that a fire alarm has been triggered and he or she should follow to the nearest exit. Similarly, children at CHC may respond less effectively to security threats such as an intruder who has gained unauthorized access to the facility.

The client desires a solution that also provides tools for facilities personnel to quickly locate children throughout the premises during emergency situations and for security personnel to monitor the security situation on the premises. These tools must provide the real-time locations of all personnel and students inside the buildings to facilitate rapid response to emergency situations during emergencies and also the ability to detect and prevent un-authorized access to facilities, as detailed in Section 3 (Functional Requirements). These tools will be based on the location and time information collected from card-swipes as described above.

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2. Current Solutions

Automated tracking of location is commonplace nowadays and a number of solutions are available in the market for this purpose. The most common use of tracking is in inventory management where the focus is to accurately and automatically track the movement of goods and inventory through warehouses, factory floors and stores. Recently, tracking of personal location has become increasingly common, especially with rise of social media such as facebook and loopt which allow users to publish their location. There systems use GPS co-ordinates and are effective only in wide-spread geographic locations such as a city or a neighborhood.

However, in PinPoint, we are interested in tracking the location of people inside a building or closed premises, which is far more complex than tracking people by geographical information or of goods entering or leaving a building such as a warehouse. In what follows, we review three solutions that are closest to our scenario. While each solution provides a mechanism of tracking personnel inside an enclosed area, none of them fit the requirements we describe in Section 3. In what follows, we review each solution and present deficiencies that make it difficult to adapt these solutions directly.

AeroScout (URL:

This tracking system solution is found in many hospitals and helps track doctors, nurses, patients as well as medical equipment. It is an interesting solution because it integrates sensors with Wi-Fi networks already in place and therefore requires no wiring, thereby making the equipment setup is fast and easy. This is a very good aspect of this solution since hospitals need to function 24/7 and cannot interrupt their operations in order to install new products. It uses Wi-Fi active RFID badges (badges that use a battery and can send a signal farther and stronger and regular RFID badges) to do the tracking. Badges are issued to doctors, nurses, and patients whom the doctors want to track. Doctors and nurses interact with the system by viewing a map of the hospital locates doctors, nurses and patients in real time. The system also send alerts to the users if a patient that the doctors are tracking has moved out of their designated rooms. Deficiencies:

1. Not integrated with a comprehensive user information that supports billing and reporting 2. Wi-Fi network needs to be in place before badges can be used

3. Badges are expensive and require changing of batteries. 4. Does not keep records of where people have been in the past. 5. Training is needed to understand how to use the system 6. Client software must be installed on all computers

RFID Centre (URL:

This system, like AeroScout, also makes use of the already in place Wi-Fi network to track badges that are given to people or placed on objects. The badges are battery powered so that a strong signal can be sent from the badge to the receiver at any time and from a farther distance than an RFID badge could. This system records all movements so that records can be viewed at a later date. It is customizable and allows specification of “rules” that sound alarms if a badge is detected going into a predetermined restricted room or zone. The user interacts with the system by viewing a map of the building on a web page using a secure password so that tracking can be done on internet-enabled device. The system may also be easily expanded at any time if more rooms are built in the facility or more people/objects need to be tracked. This solution is also interesting in the fact that it also provides an outdoor tracking system, separate from the indoor tracking system, using GPS. This allows people who are traveling or important packages to easily be tracked outside a facility and to make sure they reach their destination.

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Deficiencies:

1. The batteries in badges must be charged at all times.

2. Wi-Fi network needs to be already in place or must be installed prior to tracking 3. Wi-Fi needs to be up and running at all times.

4. Not integrated with information systems to support archiving of location information and reporting functions.

AwarePoint (UR

This solution has a lot of great properties that apply specifically to the needs of hospitals and clean environments. This product uses sensors in each room and badges on medical equipment, and on any staff that need to be tracked in the hospital. Installation is quick and easy, promising a “dust-free installation” that will not interfere or threaten the security with the current networking solution in place. Staff can easily view a map of the hospital on a browser and track equipment or other staff. The user interface is a web based application so no software needs to be installed on the hospitals computers and no new equipment needs to be purchased. Another great aspect to this design is that since it is web based, any device that can get online (phone, PDA, portable computer) is able to view the tracking web site and find where people/equipment are located in real time. The web based software solution can also manage past historical data on where people/equipment have been, and is able to create custom alerts and reports. Also, a hospital is able to rent the system so that they do not have to pay a large sum of money to have this product.

Deficiencies:

1. If internet service goes down, tracking is unavailable 2. No automatic billing solution is built in

3. Badges are only guaranteed for three years

3. Functional Requirements

This section describes the requirements and functions that must be fulfilled by the system.

1. Controlled Access to Facilities:

Access to the building and to each room in the building must be controlled by an access control mechanism such as access badges or card-swipes. Each user (personnel, students and parents) must be issued identity tokens (access badges or swipe cards) which will enable tracking of their movements in the facility and the system should allow easy creation of mapping between a badge and a person (student or personnel). Access to rooms should be controlled by privilege of access – only people with a given privilege should be able to gain access to a room. For example, a speech therapist should be able to swipe-in to a given room but may not necessarily be able to access a room where physical-therapy sessions are held. Also, the system should make it easy to configure these privilege-based access scenarios.

2. Real-Time Tracking of Personnel and Students:

The system should be able to accurately determine the location of a person within the facility at any given point in time. It should also be possible to determine the occupants of a room with-in the facility and the duration for which each individual is present in a given room. This information should be archived and used as per requirements (3) and (4) below.

3. Data Capture and Reporting Requirements:

The tracking information described in (2) above should be captured and stored for a specified duration of time and this information should be used to automatically generate some of the reports that are routinely issued by the client. Some examples of these reports include:

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a. Child Therapy Progress Reports: These reports show the therapies that have been administrated to a given child and the durations of these therapy sessions.

b. Billing Reports: These reports are issued to county school systems and insurance agencies that sponsor or pay for these therapy services.

The system should generate these reports in the format that will be provided by the client and should be generated in a variety of file-types such as Adobe PDF and Microsoft Excel. Additional reports that use the location tracking information may be needed in future. Therefore, it is imperative that the system support adding of new reports without incurring a huge cost.

4. Tools to monitor security:

The system must provide tools to monitor the security in the facility. These tools will utilize the location tracking information as described in (2) above to give a birds-eye view of security situation in the building and track the location and movements of personnel and students in the facility.

These tools should make it possible to easily locate any person in the building at any given time. Using this tool, it should possible to view the people occupying any given room in the facility and the duration for which they have been there. This tracking must be accurate and time-sensitive, since this tool will be used by security personnel monitoring the facility and by facilities personnel who will use the tool to locate people inside the facility in case of an emergency.

Additionally, these tools must automate of some of the security functions by raising an alarm when an un-authorized or suspicious access pattern is detected. The security personnel have identified some scenarios which they believe are examples of suspicious or un-authorized activity and routinely monitor for. These include:

a. A person trying to access a number of rooms in a very short duration of time. b. A person with an expired or duplicate badge entering the facility.

c. A person trying to enter areas or rooms for which he/she does not have the privilege. d. The presence of a child alone in a therapy room for extended period of time.

The system should automatically detect such suspicious activity and trigger alarm to security personnel who will then respond to the situation. As is the case with reports, the security personnel may identify new examples of suspicious patterns and the system should incorporate these patterns easily, without incurring a huge cost.

5. User Interface:

The system will be used by staff, faculty and therapists at CHC and the parents of children to monitor the progress of therapy sessions of their own children. Therefore, it is necessary for the system to provide an intuitive and easy-to-use user interface for these users. The interface must support the following functions:

a. Entering information (personal and professional) for students and personnel. b. Associating identity tokens (badges etc) with a given person in the system. c. Granting and Revoking access privileges to a person or a group of people. d. Generating Reports as described in (3) above.

e. Viewing and downloading reports in the format desired.

The interface itself should have some kind of access control mechanism built into it to restrict the actions that that a person can take on the interface. For e.g. a parent should be able to view the progress of his/her own child and should also not be able to generate reports. Also, since the interface

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will be used by a large number of people, including those outside CHC (parents), the interface must accessible online, via the internet.

4. Objectives and Goals

First and foremost, safety is a major concern at the CHC Learning Center due to the nature of working with physically and mentally disabled children. A primary goal of the proposed solution should be to put in place a security system to ensure the safety of the students who attend the CHC Learning Center. This security system should allow employees to know exactly where in or around the building everyone is at all times in case of an emergency situation such as a fire or intruder. Employees will be provided with a graphical interface that will be displayed on a computer screen which will allow them to track the locations of each student and employee in real time. Since some students may not be able to effectively respond to and/or raise an alarm in these types of situations, a tracking system such as this will allow employees to ensure the safety of the children should a problem arise.

Another function of such a tracking system will be to ensure that certain rooms of the CHC Learning Center will only be accessible to employees and not to students. The system should otherwise sound an alarm so that an appropriate response may be taken. For instance, if a student wanders into a room that has been deemed dangerous such as a boiler room, an alarm should be sounded.

The tracking system must not only provide information about the current location of students and employees but also keep running logs of this information. This aspect of the tracking system will be to serve several purposes; the first of which being that it will allow for a real-time report of activities and therapies being conducted. This at the very least will provide parents better peace of mind when leaving their children at the school. This is because the parents will be able to closely monitor the actions of both their children and the employees who work with them in order to ensure that their child is receiving the necessary attention he/she needs.

Because the tracking system will be keeping logs of all this information about location, therapies being administered, and any activities the students may be involved in, the system should also be able to generate reports regarding such information. Currently the therapists working at the CHC Learning Center are required to fill out vast amounts of paperwork in order to prove that the children they work with are spending a sufficient amount of time doing various therapies and activities as mandated by law. The implementation of such a system as described will allow the therapists to spend less time doing arduous paperwork and spend more time working with their students. The system will also help to keep costs down and prevent any inaccuracies that may be inherent with doing this sort of paper work by hand.

5. User Profile and Deployment Environment

In this section, we describe the profile of the users vis-à-vis the PinPoint system and describe their access privileges and the actions they should be able to perform. We also describe briefly, the environment in which the system will be deployed.

The following user-profiles should be supported by the system:

• Supervisor- should have complete access to the system in order to monitor students’ therapy sessions to ensure that they are being correctly recorded and are sufficiently fulfilling the mandated requirements for time in each area of activity and therapy

o Supervisor should also have some editing control of the system to account for any errors in the time tracking system (such as a badge not registering)

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o They will also be able to view both staff and student location/activity in real-time and also have access to their past activities.

• Teachers/Staff- should have access to a map/layout of the building that shows current locations of all students and staff

o Should have access to student and staff names and access to student records for the week/month to make sure they are on track with the mandated requirements

o Should NOT have editing access to records and can go to the supervisor if they feel any circumstance of inaccuracies have occurred in the system

o Should be able to run billing reports and child progress reports.

• Security and Facilities - should have access to a real-time mapping of the building with all staff and student locations

o Should have access to full names/ locations of everyone in the building

o Should NOT have access to staff/student records or past activity

o Should be alerted when any emergency situation arises or unauthorized access to a particular room

• Parents- should have the ability to track only their child/children in real-time

o Will be allowed limited viewing privileges

o Have access to only their child’s/children’s records

Deployment Environment

The system will be deployed at CHC learning center, which is a single storied building located in Williamsville NY. Currently the rooms do not have identity token based access and all rooms have to be equipped to support this kind of access control. Tokens need to be issued to all users of the facility and their access privileges need to be configured.

The computer systems are used by personnel at CHC vary widely in configuration and most of these systems are desktops. It is therefore imperative to place stringent requirements on the systems on which the software will be used. No information is available (at present) about availability of computer systems where the software will be installed.

6. Constraints

The CHC Learning Center is a non-profit organization that serves the physically and mentally disabled of the Buffalo area. As a result, there are many constraints that have to be taken into consideration when developing a project such as the PinPoint badge tracking system. A major consideration that should be accounted for includes budget constraints.

• Budget

o CHC Learning Center is not a public school, no part of the local school tax goes to the general budget for the facility.

o The budget that can be applied to these types of projects is very limited and overhead must be kept low in order to provide the quality care and attention that is needed for the people of the community.

o Must make up for its initial cost by saving the facility money.

• Audience and Usability

o Most of the teachers and faculty are likely to be older and trained more in psychology and teaching methods rather than technology.

 Teachers are less likely to be technologically savvy.

 Should not be surprising if several teachers in the facility do not interact with a computer at all in their day-to-day lives

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 The system should be user-friendly in the sense that teachers and faculty members are likely to be interacting with the system with minimal knowledge of how it actually works.

o Students and children that use the facility are less likely to be technologically savvy.

 Many of the children that are taught in the CHC Learning Center have severe physical and/or mental disabilities.

 May be unable to fully interact with computer systems as the average person may do on a day-to-day basis.

 The system should anticipate this and be easy to use and completely transparent to the students. This would allow for a high degree of accuracy, minimal mistakes and, thus, less overhead for the facility.

o The design of the badges will vary depending on who is using them.

 Badges should be child-proof, as the mentally disabled children may not understand the proper way to handle the badges.

 Since many of the children taught at the facility are wheelchair-bound, the badges must also be able to be easily clipped onto a wheelchair without interfering with the wheelchair’s operation or comfort.

 The badges should be comfortable for teachers and faculty to wear all day without interfering with their range of movement.

• Schedule

o The school fosters a learning environment that should be free from distractions.

o Fast installation procedure should be a paramount point in the schedule; minimal disruptions should be a goal.

o The faster the system can be programmed, configured and put online, the more money the system can save the CHC Learning Center within a specific timeframe.

7. Deliverables

• Hardware:

1. Identity token (badge or swipe card) readers for every room at the facility.

2. Identity tokens for all users (students and personnel). The number of such badges will be communicated after the client reviews her requirement.

• Software:

1. The application that will be used by staff, teachers and therapists at CHC as per requirements described in Section 3.

2. Monitoring tools for security and facilities personnel as per requirements as described in Section 3.

• Installation and Configuration:

1. Identity token readers will be installed outside every room in the facility and will be connected to the software system.

2. The software will be installed and configured as per requirements (section 3 & 4).

• Training

1. A comprehensive manual describing all the functions of the system must be provided.

2. A training program should be developed for all the personnel using the system, either in the form of video recordings or on-site training sessions.

•

Support

1. There must be a pilot phase after the system is deployed wherein the system should be tested live for a period of 6 months.

2.

A service level agreement (SLA) should be negotiated on or before the end of October-2010 detailing the levels of services and support expected and guaranteed.

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8. Future Plans and Expandability

A working system that meets all the requirements and specifications put forth by the CHC Learning Center is absolutely necessary, but overall the system would be useless if it could not be adapted to changing requirements and user needs. Thus, PinPoint should be flexible enough to change with the growth of the center and the ever-changing needs that teachers face while still supporting a strong framework that fosters security and safety.

• Growth of the center along with its student faculty and staff population.

o PinPoint should be able to handle this growth gracefully while remaining agile, accurate and stable.

o It must also allow physical changes and expansion of the monitoring system:

 If the layout of building is changed or augmented with additional floors, it should be very easy to reconfigure and install the sensors to reflect this change.

• New and Emerging Technologies

o If better wireless scanners emerge in the future, for example, the system should facilitate the replacement of the old scanners.

o If better billing and spreadsheet software comes out on the market, the system should be able to export its data into that format, if needed.

• Collaborative Integration

o In the long term, we would want to integrate PinPoint with other learning centers to increase collaboration and sharing of information.

o We would also want to integrate PinPoint more closely with government agencies, as they increase their automation, to transmit billing and child progress reports automatically rather than sending them through mail.

 Has the potential to save taxpayers and learning centers money in postage and paper.

PinPoint: Badge Tracking System