Emanate Wireless and Silicon Labs’ Machine Learning Open the Door to Affordable, Clinical-Grade RTLS for Hospitals of All Sizes
Hospitals and other healthcare providers are constantly struggling with the pressure to deliver better health outcomes with fewer resources. Margins are thin, budgets are shrinking, and staff satisfaction is challenged by heavy workloads and inefficient processes. Without more time or money to throw at these issues, administrators are increasingly looking to smarter connected health systems to drive efficiency without compromising patient care.
The Hidden Cost of Inefficiency in Healthcare Operations
One major inefficiency lies in the way hospitals track staff, patients, and equipment. From infusion pumps to portable monitors, there may be dozens of items in patient rooms that have to be available at exactly the right moment. When assets are misplaced or staff movements are difficult to coordinate, time is wasted, and care suffers. In fact, hospital staff spend an average of one hour per shift just locating supplies and equipment. Real-time location services (RTLS) promised to transform these processes with automated tracking that delivered room-level accuracy. But until now, the technology has been out of reach for most hospitals.
Traditional RTLS solutions were built on proprietary protocols and infrastructure-heavy deployments. These systems required extensive cabling, dedicated receivers, and specialized tags, driving hardware costs. Installation was just as burdensome, requiring dense receiver grids and meticulous calibration to maintain even modest accuracy.
As a result, only about a quarter of hospitals can afford these systems. Even then, accuracy often fell short, with systems reporting location data within a few feet at best. In healthcare, that margin is unacceptable. If a nurse’s badge is off by just a few feet, a system might incorrectly record them in a hallway instead of a patient’s room, undermining compliance, reporting, and ultimately, patient trust.
The Challenge
Effective indoor location tracking has been a longstanding ambition, but very difficult to deliver in environments where accuracy is critical. Hospitals in particular have sought out cost-effective ways to achieve clinical-grade room-level accuracy in real-time location services without the prohibitive costs and complexity of legacy systems.
The Solution
Emanate Wireless enlisted Silicon Labs and the MG26 Multiprotocol Wireless SoC to build a battery-powered, AI-enabled Bluetooth doorway chokepoint system that delivers 99.9% room-level accuracy at a fraction of traditional costs.
The Result
The collaboration has unlocked scalable, affordable Real-Time Locationing System (RTLS) adoption, reducing infrastructure costs from more than $1,000 per room to just $100, delivering savings of more than 85% and opening the door to new automation opportunities across healthcare.
Emanate Wireless Breaks Through with Radio Vision for RTLS
Emanate Wireless set out to solve this problem and pioneered a new approach with its Radio Vision solution. RadioVision is powered by Silicon Labs’ MG26 Bluetooth SoC, which features a matrix vector processor (MVP) for AI/ML acceleration. Instead of relying on dense receiver grids, Radio Vision includes a compact, battery-powered device located at the doorway of each room. This creates a wireless choke point where traffic in and out of the room is naturally limited, making it possible to determine whether a tag crossed into or out of a room. The system delivers 99.9% room-level accuracy, matching the needs of clinical environments. At the core of this breakthrough is a proprietary machine-learning algorithm that analyzes continuous signal data to accurately identify a path of travel through the doorway. Crucially, the cost per room dropped from more than $1,000 to just over $100 and opened the door for broad adoption across hospitals of all sizes and budgets.
Because the system is battery-powered and built on Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), it avoids the complexity of power-over-ethernet installations and offers five years of battery life under typical hospital workloads.
How Silicon Labs Technology Enables RTLS
Silicon Labs’ technology played a pivotal role in making Emanate Wireless’ vision possible. The BG22 Bluetooth SoC acts as an angle of arrival (AoA) receiver, listening to the tag via an antenna array to collect CTE packets and extract phase information for precise direction finding. The MG26 then processes this data, running machine learning inference on Silicon Labs’ integrated AI accelerator. This hardware-enabled ML capability allowed Emanate Wireless to run models that could distinguish doorway crossings with extraordinary 99.9% accuracy, even in the multipath and interference-rich environments typical of hospitals.
Beyond hardware, Silicon Labs’ development tools accelerated the company’s progress, including Silicon Labs RAIL (Radio Abstraction Interface Layer), which provides an easily customizable interface. This, coupled with the Machine Learning Extension in Simplicity SDK, made it possible for Emanate Wireless to avoid extensive customization.
Clinical-Grade RTLS is Transforming Healthcare Operations
Hospitals can now automate workflows that once relied on manual processes. For example, when a patient presses a nurse call button, the system can automatically log a nurse’s arrival when their badge crosses into the room, eliminating the need for manual acknowledgment and improving compliance reporting.
Staff can instantly locate critical equipment, reducing wasted time searching for devices and ensuring availability where it matters most. Asset utilization improves, capital expenditures fall, and patients receive faster care. Nurses gain back time to focus on patients rather than paperwork, boosting both satisfaction and outcomes.
Because RadioVision works with off-the-shelf Bluetooth tags and wearables, hospitals avoid vendor lock-in and can expand the system to smartphones, smart badges, and future devices without redesign. This flexibility ensures the system can scale across entire facilities, assisted living centers, or long-term care environments.
The promise of affordable, accurate clinical RTLS extends far beyond hospitals. Assisted living facilities, long-term care providers, and other healthcare settings all face similar challenges in asset and staff tracking. With the cost-efficient approach of RadioVision, RTLS can move from a luxury for elite hospitals to a standard for the broader healthcare market.
By solving one of the hardest problems in wireless, achieving reliable room-level accuracy indoors, Emanate Wireless and Silicon Labs have unlocked a new era of location-aware healthcare. Hospitals can finally meet the twin imperatives of efficiency and care quality, ensuring that staff, patients, and equipment are always in the right place at the right time.