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Beyond Retail: Healthcare, Marijuana & Aerospace Defense Manufacturing Industries Turn to Location Technologies to Prevent Theft & Save Lives
[August 09, 2017]

Beyond Retail: Healthcare, Marijuana & Aerospace Defense Manufacturing Industries Turn to Location Technologies to Prevent Theft & Save Lives


Proximity.Directory, the world's largest directory of proximity companies, has released its Q2 2017 Report, which aggregated information from more than 400 Proximity Solution Providers (PSPs) in 55 countries and reveals the latest trends, facts and figures from the global proximity industry and takes a deep-dive into the impact of proximity marketing on asset tracking and how location technologies are shaping industries from healthcare and tourism to aerospace defense manufacturing and mining. This is the ninth Proximity.Directory report to be released.

"Tracking the physical location of people and assets has some critical real life applications in many industries where accurate and timely location of moving objects is crucial for achieving the best results," said Thomas Walle, CEO and co-founder of Unacast. "Proximity technologies are no longer just utilized in retail marketing, as virtually every business process relies on people and assets. As proximity technologies are being used for more diverse use cases such as asset and people tracking, a range of new exciting and effective approaches and implementations of this technology are being employed."

In healthcare, locating a patient, the correct part or piece of medical equipment, or even a specialized surgeon, quickly and accurately is of paramount importance and can potentially save lives.

In the quickly growing marijuana industry, precise location data could be one of the biggest game changers. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are used for passive location monitoring. RFID tags track location only when they are scanned through the specific equipment. The technologies can also track when plants are moved from one room to another and conditions in a room, such as humidity, light, temperature, and eight of the plants.



Key findings from case studies highlighted in the report include:

  • The $9.1 trillion global logistics industry will save billions by increasing transparency: beacons can monitor temperature, humidity, weight, interactions, and other required features of tagged items.
  • GeoShepard™ is the first to market automated cannabis tracking system that is patent protected.
  • Connected devices and IoT have the potential to create $8 trillion in economic value globally by 2025.
  • In 2016 alone, more than 24 million pieces of baggage were lost; and due to the lack of tracking technology more than 1 million of these items have never been recovered.
  • Bluetooth Low Energy Real Time Location System (BLE RTLS) employee tracking systems have been officially approved by the governments in Finland and Turkey, among others, as systems that help locate victims and increase chances for saving lives in case of on the job accidents.

Industry Statistics:


  • Among different proximity technologies, Beacons are still the most popular with 91% of the companies delivering these solutions. GPS/Geofencing and Wi-Fi continue to grow and are offered by 58% and 35% of the companies respectively.
  • The world is sensored up further, and as of Q2 2017, more than 15 million sensors are registered on the Proximity.Directory. Sixty-six percent of these sensors are beacons, 20% are Wi-Fi points, and 14% are NFC sensors.
  • Compared to the same period last year (Q2 2016), the number of Wi-Fi sensors deployed has increased more than 25 times, and beacons have increased 1.7 times, while the number of NFC sensors remained somewhat stable.
  • PSPs do not want to exclusively choose between iBeacon and Eddystone as most of the companies work with both protocols depending on the use cases. Eddystone is currently supported by the 56% of the industry while iBeacon by 87%.
  • Europe and North America are leading the number of PSPs registered with Proximity.Directory mostly due to active omnichannel marketing in the retail industry across these regions. The US represent 39% of the total number of PSPs and European countries account for 40%.

About Unacast

Unacast, the world's leading location and proximity data platform, built the Real World Graph™ to understand how people and places are connected. Unacast empowers the next generation of data-driven industries with unique and highly accurate data sets and insights, built on a foundation of double-deterministic™ proximity data.

Unacast is based in NYC, founded by Thomas Walle and Kjartan Slette, who were also part of the founding team behind TIDAL, the music streaming company acquired by Jay Z. Unacast has garnered multiple awards for its platform, campaigns and for its rapid company growth, most recently winning the Ads-to-Action Award in the "verticals & marketplaces" category at the Local Search Association (LSA) awards in San Diego. Inc. Magazine has called Unacast "The Startup That Just Might Threaten Google (News - Alert)."

About Proximity.Directory

Proximity.Directory is the world's largest directory of proximity companies. Recently rebranded from Proxbook to open up the platform to a wider audience and companies, shifting from having a technology specific focus towards the deterministic location story. Proximity.Directory's quarterly reports aggregate information from more than 400 Proximity Solution Providers (PSPs) in 55 countries and reveals the latest trends, facts and figures from the global proximity industry.


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