Location and zones
Where the hotel installs Bluetooth beacons, a badge can report which zone it is in. It is zone level, never coordinates, and how much of it a property sees is a setting the general manager controls.
How it works
A beacon is a small battery device on a wall. A badge listens briefly every minute and tells Harlow which beacon it heard most strongly. Harlow turns that into a zone: a floor's corridor, the lobby, the pool deck, the linen room. Rooms without their own beacon belong to their floor's corridor zone. The badge never reports a position, only the name of a zone.
The three modes
- Off
- Nothing is stored. Badges still report; the hotel keeps none of it.
- Coverage
- The hotel knows how many people are in a zone, for dispatch, safety and the quiet places. Nobody is named, and history exists only as counts.
- Live
- Coverage plus who is where now, and the last 48 hours per person.
The highest mode available depends on the property's country. Where the law or our assessment does not allow naming people, the ceiling is coverage; the manager can always choose a lower mode, never a higher one than the ceiling. Switching to off also deletes what the property already holds.
What staff see
In live mode, each person is told once at sign-in: "On shift, your badge reports the zone it is in." Nothing is reported off shift. A badge that is switched off reports nothing.
What it is used for
- Sending a request to the nearest person, and showing how far away responders are during an alert.
- Noticing a guest area with nobody in it for too long.
- Measuring wait time by place and demand by hour, as aggregates.
- The evacuation roll call, which may name people in any mode because it is life safety, and only while an evacuation is open.
Beacons
Harlow works with standard Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. Beacons a hotel already has for other systems can often be used as they are; we confirm this per property. Beacons do not connect to anything, contain no microphone or sensor, and the hotel owns them.