“With HID technologies, we have changed the location-aware landscape, delivering location as a service.  Now, healthcare organizations can easily lay out the foundation for IoT applications, such as wayfinding.” –
Rom Eizenberg, Vice President of Sales, Bluvision, part of HID Global

It can be easy to get lost inside a hospital, but a new partnership between HID Global and Phunware is aimed at making it a bit harder.

The companies are putting their heads together to develop a wayfinding app for mobile devices. The aim is to deliver a user-friendly app that gives smartphone users clear, step-by-step instructions to navigate a given hospital and get to their appointments. It will leverage HID Location Services together with Phunware’s mobile wayfinding technologies to make that happen.

As HID Global Sales VP Rom Eizenberg explained in a statement, the solution delivers “location as a service,” to the benefit of both end users and healthcare providers. “Now, healthcare organizations can easily lay out the foundation for IoT applications, such as wayfinding,” he said.

The companies’ announcement made no mention of HID’s mobile access technology, which is designed to turn an authorized user’s smartphone into a virtual key card; but it’s not difficult to imagine future applications of the wayfinding solution developed with Phunware being turned to navigation and access control for hospital staff and possibly in other enterprise or industrial applications. In the meantime, in any case, patients and hospital visitors will have an easier time getting to where they need to be thanks to the new app-based solution.