Powering a Smarter World

IoT is all about extending the power of the Internet beyond computers and smartphones to offer businesses and people with a better insight into and control over details and environments that were once inaccessible. A smart environment with IoT infrastructure, applications, and services combine a complex set of technologies to deliver end-user applications for smart cities, smart factories, and smart homes. This smart world is powered by different fundamental advances in technology. Accurate location data is a prime cornerstone of a fully-connected and automated value chain and can be enabled by RTLS (Real-Time Location System). Pioneering this RTLS technology to deliver smarter solutions for a smart world, is Eliko, an Estonian embedded electronics, and software company. Since 2004, Eliko has been developing technologies and solutions for smart cities, Industry 4.0, smart factories, healthcare, and many other niche domains. “Our long history and broad-ranging expertise in IoT enables us to build reliable, long-lasting solutions that make an impact and improve the quality of life around the world,” elaborates Indrek Ruiso, CEO of Eliko.

Rising higher above the simple IoT products, Eliko provides embedded systems for smarter solutions in the industrial, military, and medical sector. Eliko’s KIO RTLS, an indoor tracking system, detects precise location coordinates using the time-of-flight (ToF) positioning method on ultra-wideband (UWB) radio technology. Unlike the signal strength-based Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or RFID positioning, UWB technology has reduced interference with other wireless networks and enables coordinate-based accuracy even through obstacles. In the manufacturing industry, the KIO RTLS tag helps track forklifts, pallets, containers, or other manufactured parts. This product can also track people in cases of employee route optimization, manufacturing and medical institution safety, or detection of player location in indoor sports.

Eliko has developed a demo street in Tallinn known as the Kalaranna Smart Street to showcase how modern street-lighting infrastructure can be used to gather valuable data about the urban environment. Sensors were added to the connected lights to collect information about the street’s electricity consumption, noise and traffic levels and even the amount of garbage in its cans. Eliko successfully transformed Kalaranna into a collaborative space for researchers, companies, and citizens to co-develop smart solutions. Eliko plans to add new layers to this smart street demo site so that the street lights, with their sensors and controllers, can gather information about everything and assist in taking action based on the collected real-time information. With this, the street-lights will also be able to monitor people’s heart rates from a distance and detect anomalies and sudden health problems.

Eliko has a powerful and compact Quadra platform, which is a patented impedance spectroscopy analyzer. As a real-time electrical impedance spectroscopy device, Quadra expertly measures a spectrogram of 15 frequencies with a speed of 1000 measurements per second, thereby, enabling fast, real-time detection of changes in any object with electrical properties. Quadra has autonomous field applications in food technology, diagnostics, and biomedicine. Injeq, a promising Finnish medical device company, leveraged Eliko's Quadra bioimpedance spectroscopy to develop a smart spinal needle for real-time tissue identification. Eliko also developed a small wireless measurement system, MTN500, which facilitates inertial motion tracking, suited for both research and industrial applications of aeronautics, medical therapy, mobile VR apps, and sports science.

Placing all the Eliko's technologies in a practical, real-life case to look at a clear outcome—a patient's daily walking distance could be measured with KIO RTLS while his motion capture and analysis with MNT500; and in the future, his heart and lungs could be monitored with the help of Quadra. Over the years, Eliko's team has been awarded 13 patents and has to its credit hundreds of publications. “It is no longer about what technology can do, but what people can do with new, high-performing networks and platforms and disruptive technologies,” concludes Ruiso.