DigiGround offers cloud-based tracking solutions that use AWS Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to locate assets, staff and customers in real time with 10-centimetre accuracy using ultra-wideband technology run on serverless Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT architecture.
Tracking Assets With AWS
“Our solutions are created on AWS because we do a lot of work within the startup and SME industry with limited resources,” says Joel Magin, DigiGround business consultant. “We estimate that running on AWS has enabled us to get to the market with our solution that can scale to serve the needs of the large applications at one-third the cost of alternative approaches. This is because we avoid the cost of physical infrastructure, as well as being able to take advantage of off-the-shelf IoT services that help us to move quickly.”
Next generation real-time location services in the cloud
Although the idea of tracking assets and people is not new, transitional solutions do have limitations. Many legacy tracking services rely on sensors that provide binary ye/no information, such as whether one sensor is close to another one. Which means those solutions have heavy infrastructure requirements and can deliver ambiguous or inaccurate information.
DigiGround can offer solutions that provide precise X, Y and Z coordinates. That means they can have up to 10x more accuracy than the more traditional RTLS with a lightweight footprint.
At DigiGround, we often see opportunities to take tracking to the next level. We thrive on working with apps that require latest cloud technology stacks. This can offer more accurate location intelligence and provide valuable new categories of information.
Without the flexibility and scale available from AWS, our offering would have been a non-starter. DigiGround compared cloud vendors before choosing AWS for one of our first projects (Taxi-tracking software), based on the breadth and maturity of its services and the viability of a serverless architecture.
Our location intelligence solutions use AWS IoT Core to connect tracking tags or sensors to the cloud. Using tools such as Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to handle the ingestion, monitoring and analysis of data stored in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data lake.
We prefer, where possible, to use Amazon CloudFront-hosted web interface. This uses real-time location information stored in Amazon DynamoDB to provide users with a live ‘dot’ experience, like that of some of the more popular mobile navigation apps.
When blended with the subscriptions feature of the AWS AppSync, a managed service that uses GraphQL, we can enable highly scalable applications to securely access, manipulate and combine data from multiple sources. For many apps, this provides a level of situational awareness in real time with limitless scale.
The serverless architecture also lays a foundation for future integrations and growth. With the situational intelligence that we can obtain through AWS IoT, we can provide flexibility to integrate, measure and act on any new data sources as they become available.
AWS Services
- AWS AppSync
- Amazon Kinesis
- Amazon DynamoDB
- AWS IoT Core
Benefits of AWS
- Real-time location intelligence
- 10 times more accurate than legacy services
- One-third the cost of competitive systems
- Highly secure
- Lightweight infrastructure footprint
- Massively scalable
- Track assets and/or people
