Planning Your IoT-Driven Workplace Safety Strategy
August 7, 2023
Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) technology works by connecting smart devices to local networks, which gather data about their surroundings. This data is
Use Cases · IoT Sensors
A small BLE beacon, clipped to a fire extinguisher or worn on a lanyard, is enough to know exactly where it’s been. Collie’s beacon network puts every tracked asset and person on a live floor plan, keeps a history of how they moved, and tells you the moment a device needs a new battery.
Why it matters
A misplaced tool, an unaccounted-for worker during an emergency, or a piece of equipment nobody can locate — all solvable with a signal cheaper than a keychain.
Fire extinguishers, tools, and mobile equipment drift from where they’re supposed to be — and searching for them wastes real working hours.
When something goes wrong on site, knowing exactly who’s where — for rescue and recovery — shouldn’t depend on a headcount and guesswork.
Without movement history, there’s no way to see how assets and staff actually flow through a site — data that’s often the key to optimising a warehouse layout.
What’s inside
Every tracked beacon appears as a dot on your building’s actual floor plan, positioned in real time using signal strength.
Play back where a person or asset has been over the last hour, day, or week — a trail, not just a dot.
Battery level and last-seen time for every tag, so a dying beacon gets swapped before it goes dark, not after.
Get notified the moment a tracked asset or person enters or leaves a zone they shouldn’t — a restricted area, or simply the building.
Beacon types
Beyond position, different beacons read different things — chosen per asset, not one-size-fits-all.
A basic BLE tag for location — clipped, stuck, or worn, tracked purely by signal strength.
Keychain or card-format tags designed to be carried or worn for continuous personnel tracking.
Accelerometer-equipped beacons that detect strong movement or a fall, and trigger an alert automatically.
Beacons with a temperature or humidity probe, from freezer monitoring to ambient job-site conditions.
Detects a magnetic field to sense whether a door, cabinet, or panel is open or closed.
Detects nearby objects or people at close range — from occupied seats to a bin that’s nearly full.
Detects water leaks or liquid level changes, useful for facilities with sensitive equipment nearby.
Reads dry or wet contact and high/low signals from third-party equipment, feeding them into the same platform.
How it flows
Each beacon broadcasts a signal at a set interval, picked up by nearby gateways scanning continuously.
Signal strength across multiple gateways places the beacon on your floor plan — no GPS needed indoors.
Every position update builds into a movement history, ready to review, export, or replay later.
Beacon tags are inexpensive, battery-powered, and stick-and-forget — some run for years on a single charge, with no wiring and no ongoing maintenance.
MOD.02 · Also on the fleet
Fixed gateways cover fixed floors. A Collie robot on patrol can carry a beacon gateway with it — picking up tagged assets and personnel in aisles, yards, or outdoor areas that a wall-mounted gateway would never reach.
Where it’s deployed
Warehouse asset flow and utilization, tracked to optimize layout and reduce search time.
Critical equipment tracking — infusion pumps, wheelchairs — so nothing is ever “missing”.
Security officer patrol tracking, confirming rounds were actually completed on schedule.
Worker tracking across a site for both safety and rescue & recovery scenarios.
Tagged assets and personnel are tracked in real time, so instead of spending hours searching for a missing forklift or tool, you can see its last known location on the dashboard.
Anything that can carry a tag or beacon – from mobile equipment and forklifts to tools and valuable inventory – feeding the same location dashboard as personnel tracking.
Yes, within the areas covered by tracking infrastructure, personnel location is visible on the same map view used for asset tracking.
Location history is logged over time, so if an incident happens, you can reconstruct where an asset or person was, rather than relying on memory or fragmented paperwork.
Yes – patrol robots such as the wheeled unit or robot dog can extend tracking coverage into areas a fixed sensor network doesn’t reach.
Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) technology works by connecting smart devices to local networks, which gather data about their surroundings. This data is
Tell us what you need to keep an eye on — people, equipment, or both — and we’ll show you what a beacon deployment would look like.