Ekahau Delivers Real-Time Location Tracking Technology to Prestigious Brazilian Cancer Institute

By Ekahau Inc., PRNE
Monday, December 13, 2010

Ekahau RTLS Helps ICESP Comply with Utstein Guidelines for Code Blue and Code Yellow Events, Fosters Fast Two-Way Communications

RESTON, Virginia, December 14, 2010 - Ekahau Inc., the worldwide leader in high performance
Wi-Fi-based Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) (
www.ekahau.com/products/real-time-location-system/overview.html),
today announced that Ekahau RTLS is being utilized as the underlying
real-time tracking and bi-directional communications technology for a staff
tracking solution at Instituto do Cancer do Estado de Sao Paulo Octavio Frias
de Oliveira - ICESP, part of the "Sistema FMUSP-HC" system, which is the
largest public cancer treatment center in Latin America. The hospital, which
spans 28 floors in a building located in the heart of Sao Paulo, Brazil, will
use the Ekahau technology to track response time to patients who are in
cardiac arrest or when their conditions quickly become unstable.

(Logo: www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090513/347052 )

Ekahau RTLS is the foundation of ICESP's custom-built
software, SIGAME, which was developed by RFsense (www.rfsense.com.br/)
, a Brazilian RTLS and RFID solutions provider, with the support of Ekahau's
local distributor Synergy Tecnologia (www.synergy.com.br/). SIGAME
integrates with ICESP's existing VoIP PBX system, enabling the hospital to
manage code occurrences and track all healthcare professionals involved in
the process. ICESP is using the solution to comply with Utstein guidelines,
an international method for reporting cardiac arrest.

"Our evaluation process on location and tracking technologies
started in 2008, and after some research we found that we already had almost
80 percent of the infrastructure needed to implement an RTLS solution for
tracking people and medical assets using the existing Wi-Fi network. When we
launched our Code Blue/Yellow project in 2009 it was clear that an RTLS
solution was crucial to quickly locate professionals in a multi-story
hospital like ours. Ekahau was the only solution on the market that could
deliver bi-directional communications, essential for healthcare professionals
to acknowledge the emergency alerts, and could integrate with our existing
PBX system and leverage the existing Wi-Fi network, without requiring
significant expense for additional infrastructure, such as portals and
exciters," said Erika Yazaki, project manager at ICESP. "The SIGAME solution
from RFsense is built on top of Ekahau's platform and enables us to gather
information and establish efficiency metrics that would have been much more
complicated to do with other vendors' technologies. Since we are a public
hospital, it is fundamental to adopt tools which provide a tight control over
personnel, assets and processes in order to deliver full accountability to
the society."

Ekahau RTLS provides ICESP with valuable information related
to the hospital staff's response to Code Blue cardiac arrests, which require
a three-minute response time, and Code Yellow situations, when patients'
conditions become unstable and require no greater than a five-minute
response. When a code occurs, staff members who are near the patient are
alerted on their Ekahau T301BD badge tag. Individual staff members, who may
be involved in other cases, can reject the call by pushing a button on their
tag and the alarm will be escalated to other staff. The badge also provides
informational text messages related to the event. All responses are logged in
ICESP's database, including when the code was called, where each responding
staff member was located at that time, the total response time for each
person and the time the code was closed based on staff pushing a button on
their tag.

The location and time information in the database enables
ICESP to improve their response time and evaluate processes, as well as
providing information to show that each emergency was attended to in a timely
manner.

"Cancer hospitals can be a challenging environment to deploy
an RTLS system. If a solution needs to be hardwired into the hospital,
isolating the work areas and subsequently decontaminating them can be quite
costly and pose a threat to patient safety," said Clay Chase, vice
president of Worldwide Sales at Ekahau. "By using the existing WI-Fi network,
Ekahau RTLS was deployed without having to run wires and install additional
hardware. Furthermore the system is able to leverage the communications
capabilities offered by Wi-Fi that most proprietary systems lack."

Ekahau's staff tracking application with bi-directional paging
communications is the first use case being deployed by ICESP. Planning is
already under way to leverage the system for tracking and managing clinical
assets and for environmental monitoring of temperature and humidity in
patient care areas and hospital refrigerators and freezers that are used to
store tissue samples and medications.

About Ekahau Inc.

Ekahau Inc. is the industry leader in providing Wi-Fi-based
RTLS solutions. Ekahau's customers, including several Fortune 500 companies
worldwide, are realizing the benefits of Wi-Fi based location services and
innovative Wi-Fi network planning and optimization tools. Ekahau's solutions
are being used in more than 300 hospitals around the world, as well as by
manufacturing, retail and industrial companies, government agencies and the
military. Ekahau partners include wireless software developers, leading
system integrators and international OEM partners, who develop and market
wireless enterprise applications. Ekahau is a U.S.-based corporation, with
headquarters in Reston, Va., and other offices in Saratoga, Calif.; Helsinki,
Finland
; Tokyo; and Hong Kong. For more information about Ekahau, please
visit www.ekahau.com.

(c) Copyright 2010, Ekahau, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Ekahau Contact: Juliet Travis, Rocket Science PR, for Ekahau, +1-415-464-8110 x 215, juliet(at)rocketscience.com; Cindi Loveall, Marketing Director, Ekahau, +1-703-860-2850 x 1008, cindi.loveall(at)ekahau.com; ICESP Contact: Erika Yazaki, +55(11)3893-2814, Erika.Makiko(at)icesp.org.br; RFsense Contact: Adriano Goes, +55(19)3518-4500, adriano(at)rfsense.com.br

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