In 2018, the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) announced a new workplace safety initiative designed to provide emergency communications and location-based services for employees in the hospitality industry. Backed by major hotels – including Marriott International, InterContinental, Hilton, and Hyatt – the 5-Star Promise has committed to providing panic buttons to hospitality workers across the United States.
Unfortunately, while 4G LTE signals from all carriers freely propagate in open areas, inside buildings, it’s severely limited by heavy building material that blocks, absorbs, reflects, and degrades cell and Wi-Fi signals – limiting coverage and creating dead zones. These dead zones are an inconvenience for travelers but can lead to catastrophic outcomes if a panic button fails to connect.
myDevices’ No Dead Zone™ panic button technology eliminates the dead zone problem by combining cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LoRaWAN® protocols to provide comprehensive coverage across the entire property no matter how challenging the physical environment. In particular, the integration of the LoRaWAN® technology into the panic button solution makes it possible to send long range, low power, and low data bandwidth transmissions from hard to reach locations like underground, in concrete, or dense urban environments. Moreover, the myDevices solution is highly secure, affordable, installs in less than a day, it’s easy to use, and provides floor and room level accuracy as well as outdoor GPS tracking on the property. Unlike other panic button solutions, this technology does not require the use of a mobile phone to request assistance in an emergency. It also includes other significant advancements such as floor hopping algorithms and incident reports that automatically get generated when the panic button is pushed. Furthermore, myDevices’ IoT solutions have been developed from edge to cloud to meet the highest security standards. Combining the built-in security of the LoRaWAN protocol with Microsoft’s Azure IoT Hub, the No Dead Zone™ panic button solution provides secure and reliable communication between the IoT application and the devices it manages with per-device authentication, built-in device management, and scaled provisioning.
“The current crop of cellular/Wi-Fi panic buttons simply don’t meet all the requirements for employee safety,” said Kevin Bromber, CEO / Founder of myDevices. “The whole point of a panic button solution is that a lone worker can push the button when they don’t feel safe, and their exact location is transmitted to security or administration for help. These personal safety buttons need to work in elevators, stairwells, basements, parking garages, and other dead zones because critical situations don’t happen in select open areas, they can happen anywhere at any time.”
“We evaluated several other well-known panic button solutions for our 227-room hotel before choosing the myDevices’ technology,” said Bret Esbrandt, GM of Moody National Companies, a major hotel in Lyndhurst, NJ. “Quite frankly, we were surprised that the myDevices’ panic button solution was more affordable than the competition, yet the features were superior. Most importantly, we now provide our staff with buttons that work throughout the property, including the dead zones, enhancing their safety.”
myDevices’ Plug & Play solutions are available through Sprint Business as well as a growing network of channel partners.
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