San Diego’ Awarepoint, which developed wireless tags and a computerized tracking system to help hospitals and healthcare providers keep track of ventilators and other equipment, has acquired Patient Care Technology Systems, a workflow software developer in Charlotte, N.C. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Awarepoint has installed its asset tracking technology in 93 hospitals; Patient Care Technology Systems provides its software for managing hospital work flow to 60 customers. Awarepoint says the deal announced today gives it the ability to manage patient discharge information, emergency room activity, and scheduling for diagnostic imaging, laboratory services, patient surgeries and other operations.

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Stephen Tomlin has a succinct way of explaining the significance of the technology that San Diego-based Awarepoint has developed over the past five years.

Hospitals are just always looking for their stuff, says Tomlin, who is a managing member of San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and a member of Awarepoint’s board of directors. Sometimes medical equipment walks out the door. Sometimes hospital caregivers keep equipment in secretive places, so they’ll know where to find that IV infusion pump when they need one. It wasn’t an issue when times were fat, Tomlin says, because if a hospital couldn’t find the infusion pump, it could always go rent another one.

But as Tomlin puts it, the times aren’t fat anymore, and it’s becoming increasingly important these days for a sprawling medical center to know exactly where all its stuff is. Awarepoint’s technology can provide the answer—even when the stuff consists of thousands of medical items in facilities as big as Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. and the UC San Diego Medical Center, which are both Awarepoint customers.

RFID tag

Awarepoint’s technology appeared promising enough in 2005 for Tomlin to make a modest early-stage investment in the startup from Avalon’s seventh venture fund. At that time, Awarepoint was still refining its Real Time Location System, which uses Zigbee-based devices that plug into ordinary power outlets to create a wireless mesh sensor network that encompasses the entire medical center. The Zigbee network is capable of accurately tracking the location of thousands of items, each equipped with a battery-powered RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag. Signals emitted regularly by each tag can be received by 15 to 20 sensors, which collectively pinpoint its location and transmit the information to a data storage system. Awarepoint holds six patents covering its technology, and is only targeting the healthcare market.

“The networks are self-assembling and if they break, they are self-healing,” says Matt Perkins, Awarepoint’s chief technology officer. “When you deploy them in a hospital, you just plug in something that looks like a Glade air freshener in a wall socket.”

Perkins views Zigbee as an ideal technology for healthcare because it is so easy to deploy—or as Awarepoint likes to put it—hospital installations are “minimally invasive.” But as Xconomy’s Wade Roush reminds me, Zigbee also is the technology of choice at Ember, a Boston startup that has focused their chipsets on industrial and energy applications.

The company’s most-recent innovation … Next Page »

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When San Diego-based Avaak made its debut earlier this month at the spring DEMO conference in Palm Desert, CA, chief executive Gioia Messinger offered a grand description of the company’s personal video technology.”It’s like your own personal Google Street View, except it’s live, expandable, sharable, and easy—very, very easy,” Messinger told the Demo audience.

The technology enables users to easily set up a wireless Internet gateway and two small video cameras for $300, providing real-time video of anything from a family gathering to a company warehouse that can be viewed online via a personal “VueZone” account. In the same way that YouTube became ubiquitous and Google Earth forever changed the way people view the planet, Messinger said in a company statement, “We believe the Vue personal video network will transform the way consumers use remote video viewing.”

Since Avaak plans to begin selling the technology in the next few months, I met recently with Messinger and marketing vice-president Dan Gilbert to hear the Avaak story.

Messinger told me the idea for Avaak’s technology was hatched about five years ago, when the Pentagon was searching for inexpensive sensors that U.S. troops could leave behind when they must evacuate an area after securing it. In particular, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was looking to expand on wireless networking technology developed by a UC Berkeley computer science team headed by Kris Pister. The Berkeley team created wireless networks consisting of millimeter-sized sensors that were so small and so inexpensive that Pister coined the term “smart dust” to describe them. (Avaak itself is the Hebrew word for dust.) Such technology could be used by the military to track enemy movements, or to detect poisonous gas or radioactivity. Since then, Pister has founded his own startup, Dust Networks, a Hayward, CA-based company commercializing … Next Page »

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Burlington, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) has made two announcements in as many days, touching on both sides of its business, military robots and home robots.

On the military side, iRobot said Monday that it has received an award to design and develop robots for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s LANdroids program. LANdroids (the LAN stands for local area networking) are DARPA’s answer to the problem of radio-signal blockage and interference in complex urban warfighting areas, an issue that tends to degrade communications between soldiers whenever they aren’t within each other’s direct line of sight.

The agency wants iRobot and other robot makers to develop fleets of small robots that would basically function as mobile, autonomous repeater antennas. The book-sized or palm-sized bots would be dropped or thrown into an urban environment, where they’d fan out, navigating based on signal strength measurements to the optimal positions for maintaining a wireless mesh network. The network would then relay communications between soldiers, or between field units and headquarters. The robots would even form themselves into virtual chains or “tethers,” automatically maintaining communications with units that wander away from the main mesh.

Picture a desktop Wi-Fi base station with a few antennas sticking out and couple of tank treads attached, and you’ll have DARPA’s basic vision for a LANdroid. According to briefing documents, distributed last June by DARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office for bidders on the project, the robots will need to be not just agile but intelligent. They’ll need the ability to navigate within a signal-strength map to the location with the best signal; respond to the movements of other LANdroids; “heal” the mesh when other bots are lost or broken; and calculate the trade-off between the energy required to pick up a signal and the energy required to move to a location with a better signal. They’ll also need to be energy-efficient (since there might not be anyone around to recharge or replace their batteries) and inexpensive—under $100 per unit, according to DARPA.

IRobot did not specify the amount of the award it has received from DARPA, but the agency’s briefing documents state that the program’s target award size is $1 million or less per year per effort, spread over three project phases lasting one year each. In a press release, iRobot co-founder and chairman Helen Greiner said, “Research and development awards such as the DARPA LANdroids program enable us to continue driving innovation towards the next generation of revolutionary mobile, tactical combat robots that deliver advanced situational awareness and help keep warfighters out of harm’s way.”

Another array of iRobot products, just expanded today, is intended to keep swimmers out of muck’s way. Last April, iRobot introduced its Verro 300 and Verro 600 pool-cleaning robots, which were developed by Aquajet and Aquatron and brought to market under the iRobot brand name. The robots, which are tethered to an electrical transformer, are designed to be dropped into a swimming pool, where they are propelled by hydrojets, vacuuming up debris into a filtration bag and power-washing an entire pool surface in 60 to 90 minutes.

Today, iRobot surfaced two additions to the Verro line, the Verro 100 and the Verro 500. The Verro 100, expected to go on sale in April, is a simplified, economy model designed for above-ground pools, while the Verro 500, available now, features rubber rollers and brushes for more thorough surface scrubbing.

“A desire to build on iRobot’s heritage of practical and easy-to-use indoor/outdoor home helper robots was the impetus for expanding the popular Verro line,” Sandra Lawrence, president and general manager of iRobot’s home robots division, said in the company’s announcement about the new products. “As the swimming pool season kicks off in much of the country, we wanted to provide the best solutions for pool maintenance that enable pool owners to spend their leisure time enjoying their pool, rather than cleaning it.”

The company has apparently dropped the Verro 600 model. IRobot is pricing the Verro 100, Verro 300, and Verro 500 at $399, $699, and $999, respectively.

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