The Simple Tech Solution to Missing Equipment

Luggage carts have a way of disappearing in doorman buildings, tucked into hallways and forgotten until someone else needs one and can't find it anywhere. It's the kind of small, everyday annoyance most residents just shrug off. On this episode of Problem Solved, Jerry Kestenbaum, founder and CEO of Aware Buildings, explains how one frustrated building turned that minor mystery into something much bigger: a real-time tracking system built on Bluetooth beacons and a clever wearable device. What started as a way to locate carts quickly evolved into something bigger, as staff found their own creative uses for the system. Kestenbaum walks through real installation costs, the surprising ways one building repurposed the system to monitor cleaning staff coverage, and where the technology is headed next: tracking service contractors to confirm they're actually showing up and doing the work they're paid for. Habitat's Carol Ott conducts the interview.

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Emily Myers: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about challenges facing New York's co-op and condo board directors. I'm Emily Myers with Habitat Magazine, and I'm joined by Jerry Kestenbaum, founder and CEO of the technology and service provider Aware Buildings. Jerry, thanks so much for being here. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: My pleasure.

Emily Myers: If you live in a doorman building, you've probably seen it happen. The luggage carts vanish, or perhaps your building has a laundry room and the carts disappear. Equipment meant to be for everyone is never quite where it should be, and no one knows where it went. Today's conversation looks at a surprisingly simple solution to a modern building problem, indoor tracking.

We'll talk about how one building's frustration with disappearing equipment turned into a broader system of oversight and even security. Jerry, the building that reached out to you with this problem, what kind of building is it, and was there a specific incident that made this problem urgent? 

Jerry Kestenbaum: Yes. It's a building with two 18-story towers, and residents will very often pull up after a long weekend or something with lots of luggage to unload, and they have six beautiful luggage carts, and people bring them to take their luggage up.

But then they leave them in the hallways or wherever, and so they all disappear. And then when someone else needs a luggage cart, they have to go up and down 18 stories for one tower and then go to the other tower 18 stories up and down to go locate where the carts are. And they came to us with a request, is there a way of in real time identifying where those carts are?

Emily Myers: So the building before you came in was really simply going on a luggage cart search every time they went missing. But you've come up with a slightly different solution. Talk to me a little bit about what that solution is. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: Sure. So we have, I think that the broader way of defining the solution, because it's taken on some legs since then, is a solution that lets you define WWHH, meaning what is it that you want to track, right?

Where is it? For how long has it been there, right? And how many times does it actually go to that location? That's the broader parameters: what, where, how long, how many times. Now, for luggage carts, it's simply a matter of Where, right? I have, I name luggage cart one, two, three, four, five, six. They're pretty much all fungible.

I don't need to know which one, and I know there's one of them on the 14th floor. It's been there for seven hours. 

Emily Myers: So this is the system that you've implemented. Talk to me a little bit about how this tracking works because you're not using GPS. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: No, you can't use GPS in a building, and we also wanted to give the building the ability to be as precise as they want in terms of locations, which with GPS you really can't do.

The the system starts with these little boxes, which are Bluetooth beacons. Now, they make them different sizes, but we made them a little bit bigger so that they'll last for five or six years without a battery change, and these devices automatically beacon out every second their ID. The building sticks these on the landings in the corner by each elevator on each floor, and in the package room, and in the loading dock, and by the front gate, and any place where they think a luggage cart might disappear to that they want to track.

And this beacons out every second its unique ID, and we track those IDs. It'll say TR0315. We will track it in our computer as this is the fourth floor east elevator hallway, okay? One building has 30 of these. A second building put 84 of these in their building.

It's a much bigger building, and they put 84 around their building, and they're very inexpensive, so it's easy to add additional locations. Then we built this device, which is our mobile tracker, which you can wear around your neck, or you can put it into a case, and this is a dual radio. It does two things.

It's battery charged. The battery lasts for maybe three months without putting into the charger case. It reads in real time Bluetooth beacons, and it says, "Oh, I can see one beacon. It's the 17th floor. I must be on the 17th floor. I can see three beacons, and the 17th floor is the strongest, so I must be on the 17th floor."

Okay. "I now see the 15th floor, and it's at least this much different, so I know I've moved down to a different floor. Now I'm at the front desk." So it's constantly reading and looking to see if there's been a change of which beacon is it closest to. 

Emily Myers: So basically you have your Bluetooth beacons on each floor and throughout the building, and they're speaking to the trackers on the carts, and I guess the more beacons you have, the more precision you have in terms of the location of the Items that have the trackers on them. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: That's correct. You could use it to separate something that's 100 feet away or even something that's four feet away from the previous beacon. 

Emily Myers: Okay. And where does this information go? Is it on a digital screen in the lobby or?

Jerry Kestenbaum: So this is a dual radio, this device here. It's a very sophisticated thing because it takes that Bluetooth and it uses our LoRaWAN signal, which penetrates pretty much a whole building. That's something that we've perfected for our leak detection, a wireless network within the building that is very easy to hear.

It sensors any place in the building, and it broadcasts it out. I'm on the 17th floor. I'm on the 14th floor. Whenever it detects a change, it broadcasts out a change, which gets intercepted by our LoRaWAN radios, which covers basically the whole building. And then we add it to the database, and there are several views that you can have of this data.

The first view is right on the dashboard of BuildingLink, or even on your website or on your mobile app, where you can see immediately which cart is in which location and how long it's been there. So you can immediately run to see what you need to see. And there are a couple of other methods that data can be shown.

And we also do analytics once a day and once a month. Once a day you'll get an email on the battery life, on the activity, if any trackers have gone lost, if any of them need charging. And then once a month, you'll get an activity report, which will be able to show you, I don't know what's going on, but the 13th floor has 47 uses of this luggage cart, and the next busy floor is the 10th floor, and it usually stays up there 45 minutes to an hour, whereas the normal travel time is 15 minutes.

Analytics where you can research what the hell is going on over here. 

Emily Myers: Okay, and that prompts a memo to the 14th and the 10th floor about, cart etiquette perhaps. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: That goes to the manager, and the manager will use their diplomatic skills. Now I should say because I mentioned the what, where, when, and how many thing, so we had a second building that installed this for laundry carts. Laundry carts are a little trickier because laundry carts people will take into their homes and keep there.

You won't keep a luggage cart. You'll leave it in the hallway. But a laundry cart you'll leave in your apartment. So we gave them a method for tracking down the hallway based on signal strength which apartment it's likely to be in. But they then came up with a very smart idea on their own.

They put a tracker on each of the two vacuum cleaners that they use to sweep the halls for the south tower and the north tower, and now each day in their daily tracker report, they can see vacuum cleaner number seven was on the first floor, second floor, third floor, fourth floor, fifth floor. They hit every single floor, and the same thing with the other room.

So they are using this to not just track carts, but to track vacuum cleaners. Are you doing your job? Are we covering all the floors? It's a very interesting use case. 

Emily Myers: Yes. You said the luggage cart tracking had grown legs. And the broader application is things like this, and this is simply buildings using the technology to problem solve on their own in a way. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: Correct. And the next iteration of this application is going to be for service contractors, okay? Instead of assigning this permanently to a cart, I would assign this to a company and a person. You are the air conditioning company. You're supposed to come to this building once a quarter or once a month to check the filters, the drain, the roof, the this, that.

We have beacons in those locations, right? And then this becomes a company-assigned tracker, and as you go to those different locations, that data gets accumulated. HVAC company Eddy was here. You can pull that data over the course of a year, and all of a sudden you can see is the company that's supposed to be maintaining your air conditioning or the company that's supposed to be checking on your elevators or anybody else, are they doing it?

Are they showing up when they're supposed to show up? Are they hitting all the locations? So we think that's a fantastic application because we've heard from our buildings that they don't really know. They don't really know when they sign their contracts if their different vendors are doing what they're supposed to do or not.

Emily Myers: Okay. That's an interesting application because, of course, you're relying on the contractor carrying the tracker, and of course we're all human, we put things down, we probably lose our phones three times a day, so- 

Jerry Kestenbaum: They would assign it at the front desk. 

Emily Myers: Okay. So when the vendor comes in, you would be given the tracker.

Jerry Kestenbaum: "This is your tracker. You wear it. When you leave the building, you return it," and we know how long you've been, where you've been, how long you've been there, right? Could you possibly have checked the filters and done all the stuff that you see you're supposed to do when you were in this location for only one minute, right?

So it's transparency about what or who is where for how long and how many times. 

Emily Myers: Okay. And this could perhaps be used as a sort of security issue as well. You want to know that vendor has also left the building presumably at the end of the day. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: That's correct. We've added to our tracker the ability to assign these to people, but also to use a time interval template.

So if you are a Uber Eats person, and I wanna make sure that you're delivering it to the 13th floor, you'll typically have a short-term delivery template, and I'll expect you to be out of the building within five minutes. And if your tracker has not yet checked back into the front desk within five minutes, your PC will beep and say, "This person has stayed here overnight."

And then, of course, if you have people that are working there the whole day, it's a very nice thing at the end of the day, let's say contractors doing renovation work, they return their thing, they check in. Now you know there's nobody staying over your building overnight. It's a very, potentially a very big security risk to know that you're checking who you're letting into your building, but you have no idea if they've left.

There was one instance many years ago of a real estate broker or somebody who let themselves into their building, and they stayed overnight, and they went around to different apartments trying to find the empty ones in the summer and caused a lot of damage. So this lets you know where someone is not. You are no longer in my building. 

Emily Myers: Okay. So in terms of installation costs and monitoring costs, you obviously come in and install the beacons and then provide the tags. What is the cost of that for the building? 

Jerry Kestenbaum: The beacons are around $25 a piece.

So if you need, let's say 40 beacons, that comes out to around $1,000 for the beacons. The trackers are $80 a piece. Five or six there. A few gateways if you don't have LoRaWAN in your building because you're not a customer for leak detection-- it usually could be maybe another $1,500 for two or three gateways to cover your whole wireless thing.

So setting up your building for tracking of a moderate size solution would be around $3,000 usually. 

Emily Myers: Of course. So if you have the leak detection, this can be an additional element, you're saying. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: Without leak detection, you don't need gateways.

You just need the beacons, and you need the trackers. You can also attach this to tools if you have expensive tools that go walking, that move around and anything else that you might wanna track. 

I like this application because it's not a must, must-have, but it falls under the category-- it's interesting that there are certain problems that people never talk about because they're annoying, but they figure there's no solution, so what do we talk about it for?

It's just one of the sucky things of the job. So when you discover one of those and someone asks you to create a solution, it's a lot of fun because it's like a Christmas present when someone gets this in their building, 

Emily Myers: Yeah. Absolutely. And of course, luggage carts going missing is something you just gripe about at the annual meeting.

But actually, you've come up with a solution. Brilliant, Jerry. Some interesting applications there, and thank you very much for talking to us. Jerry Kestenbaum, founder and CEO of Aware Buildings. And our Problem Solved series dives into dozens of real-world examples of everything from interior design to major engineering projects with cost-saving tips, board-focused strategy, and of course, lessons learned.

If you're a board member with your own story to share, we'd also love to hear from you. Please do get in touch online at habitatmag.com or through the contact details in the monthly print magazine.