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COMPARACIÓN · SANIDAD

BLE - AoA vs UWB para sanidad RTLS — lo cual encaja.

BLE-AoA and UWB are the two leading RTLS technologies for hospital deployments — clinical workflow, infant protection, hand-hygiene compliance, asset finding, patient elopement prevention.

The accuracy needed varies dramatically by use case, and the right choice is rarely "the more accurate one". This is the operator-level comparison for clinical engineering and IT teams choosing between them.

BLE-AoA2–5 yrsBattery, sub-metrevsUWB10–30 cmSub-decimetre, months

La jerarquía de precisión en la sanidad

Hospital use cases stack at different accuracy tiers. Room-level: asset finding, broad workflow attribution, patient location for billing. Bed-level: infant protection, equipment association with patient, fall prevention, medication-administration record matching.

Sub-decimetre: hand-hygiene compliance with confirmed point-of-care attribution, surgical-instrument tracking. UWB delivers all three. BLE-AoA delivers room and bed comfortably; sub-decimetre is harder but possible in dense deployments.

Gestión de baterías de etiquetas — el factor decisivo operativo

Hospitals have hundreds to thousands of tagged staff, patients, beds and assets. BLE-AoA tags: 2–5 years on a coin cell. UWB tags: months to two years depending on update rate.

For a hospital fleet of 3,000 active tags, BLE-AoA's longer battery life reduces operational burden by 10× or more. Many large hospitals reject UWB on operational-overhead grounds even when accuracy is competitive.

Ajuste en el caso de uso

BLE-AoA wins: most asset tracking; clinical workflow attribution; bed-level infant protection (Quuppa-based systems are mainstream); broad hand-hygiene at room-level; equipment-utilisation analytics.

UWB wins: sub-decimetre hand-hygiene with confirmed point-of-care; surgical-instrument tracking; critical-care patient location with millisecond latency; high-density labour-and-delivery infant tagging.

Most hospital deployments mix both — UWB in the few zones that need it, BLE-AoA everywhere else.

Panorama de proveedores en la sanidad

BLE-AoA / multi-tech healthcare RTLS: Quuppa (BLE-AoA underlay), CenTrak (multi-tech: low-frequency RF + BLE + Wi-Fi; market leader in hospital RTLS), Stanley AeroScout (Wi-Fi based, healthcare-specific), Sonitor (ultrasound for bed-level certainty), Midmark RTLS.

UWB healthcare: BeWhere, Sewio (industrial-leaning but used in hospitals), Decawave-platform vendors. Most large hospital RTLS deployments are CenTrak or Stanley AeroScout for the broad footprint, with UWB or ultrasound for the few zones needing sub-decimetre.

Transmisión electrónica y integración clínica

Both ecosystems integrate into Epic, Cerner / Oracle Health, Meditech, Allscripts via standard interfaces (HL7 v2, FHIR, vendor-specific APIs).

Clinical workflow attribution ("who saw which patient when") requires correlating tag events with appointment data — the integration architecture matters more than the underlying radio.

We design integration in stage 1 — see /integrations/epic and /integrations/cerner-oracle-health.

Donde TRACIO recomienda cada uno

Default to BLE-AoA for new hospital RTLS deployments where broad coverage matters: asset finding, workflow, infant protection, room-level hand hygiene. The operational advantage of multi-year battery life is decisive at hospital scale.

Add UWB in specific zones where sub-decimetre accuracy is non-negotiable: high-acuity hand hygiene with confirmed POC, surgical-instrument tracking, critical-care location.

Consider multi-tech RTLS (CenTrak, Stanley AeroScout) when you want a single platform vendor covering the full breadth — accepting that no single radio does everything optimally.

Preguntas frecuentes

Preguntas frecuentes

¿Cuál es mejor para la protección infantil — BLE - AoA o UWB?

Ambos funcionan. BLE - Las soluciones Quuppa basadas en AoA son de gran uso. UWB avanza en unidades de parto muy densas donde la certeza subdecimétrica a nivel de cama es importante. La mayoría de los despliegues son BLE - AoA.

¿Funcionarán mis APs Wi-Fi existentes para RTLS?

La mayoría de los Wi-Fi hospitalarios (Cisco, Aruba) soportan el posicionamiento BLE a nivel de habitación — no submétrico AoA. El submetro necesita localizadores BLE - AoA (Quuppa) o modelos de acceso mejorados. Dimensionamos la arquitectura adecuada en la fase 1.

¿CenTrak usa BLE - AoA o UWB?

CenTrak utiliza una pila multitecnológica propietaria — RF de baja frecuencia para certeza, BLE y Wi-Fi para una visibilidad más amplia. No es puramente BLE - AoA ni UWB, sino un híbrido optimizado para hospital.

¿Cómo se integra esto con nuestro EMR (Epic / Cerner)?

A través de HL7 v2 / FHIR y APIs específicas de proveedores en los servicios de localización de Epic Rover y Cerner. Diseñamos la integración de RME en la etapa 1 — véase /integrations/epic y /integrations/cerner-oracle-health.

¿Cuál es la secuencia correcta de despliegue?

Típicamente: fase 1, amplia cobertura RTLS (BLE - AoA o multi-tecnología) para la búsqueda de activos y flujo de trabajo;

fase 2, añadir zonas de alta agudeza (UWB o ecografía) para la atribución de la higiene de manos, protección infantil, seguimiento de instrumentos quirúrgicos. Definimos fases en la etapa 1 del método /.

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