MCM Electronics, an Australian company specializing in the security alarm industry, has announced the launch of a new personal safety device, developed in collaboration with u-blox. LONEworkr, a people tracker and SOS device in a card holder format, is designed to track lone and isolated workers in order to locate them in the event of an emergency.
They needed to offer a reliable and stable personal emergency location device to their customers, to allow for monitoring of isolated workers.
The LONEworkr is very light (75g) and ultra-compact (96 x 71 x 14.4 mm). It combines a 3.75G GSM modem solution providing up to six-band HSPA+ and quad-band GSM/EDGE data transmission with a concurrent reception of GPS/QZSS, GLONASS and BeiDou. It can send an alarm and its location to a Monitoring Center (MC), which will then call the device to verify the alarm and escalate whether the emergency is genuine.
The u-blox professional grade modules embedded in LONEworkr follow their “nested design” philosophy: to maintain form factor and software continuity. This enables customers to easily upgrade their products with each new generation of u-blox wireless modules, without having to change the PCB designs. In this case it can simplify a possible later transition to an LTE modem. This easy migration between u-blox products contributes to a maximized investment, simplified logistics and drastically reduced time-to-market.
The u-blox LISA-U200 UMTS/HSPA cellular module and the CAM-M8Q M8 concurrent GNSS antenna module are currently embedded in LONEWorkr. Migration to LTE technology and the addition of short range radio capabilities are planned in the future.
