Skip to content

Crayonic Comms

Status: Beta. Crayonic Comms is in beta testing with selected customers. Capabilities marked planned are not yet available; details may change before general availability.

Where this fits

Crayonic Comms is part of Option 5 in the Solution Architecture, together with Crayonic RTLS; both ride on the BLE coverage formed by Crayonic Bridges and, where needed, IoT infrastructure.

Overview

Crayonic Comms delivers messages, calendar notifications and secure paging to the e-paper display of the Crayonic Badge™, with delivery and acknowledgement reported back to the sender — so staff can be reached without a phone, and a page is known to have arrived. Messages are addressed to a Crayonic identity, not to a phone number, and reach the badge over the same BLE coverage that Crayonic RTLS uses.

Typical sources are mail and calendar systems, nurse-call, laboratory-result and alarm systems.

How it works

  • BLE coverage. The Crayonic Bridges on your workstations form a BLE mesh; where bridges are sparse, coverage is extended with IoT infrastructure: Wi-Fi access points with a BLE gateway or dedicated gateways. Unlike RTLS, which only listens, Comms needs the coverage to reach out to the badge.
  • Delivery to the badge. The Comms service hands a message to the nearest bridge or gateway that currently sees the recipient's badge, which delivers it over BLE to the badge display.
  • Acknowledgement. The badge reports delivery, and the user's acknowledgement on the badge, back to the service and on to the sender.
flowchart LR
  SRC["Mail / calendar · nurse call ·<br/>lab results · alarms"]
  subgraph DC["Your data centre / cloud"]
    COMMS["Crayonic Comms<br/>messaging · paging · calendar"]
    CDM["CDM<br/>badge & bridge inventory"]
  end
  subgraph FACILITY["Facility"]
    BR["Crayonic Bridges (BLE mesh)"]
    AP["Wi-Fi APs with BLE gateway"]
    BADGE["Crayonic Badge<br/>e-paper display · acknowledge"]
    BR <-. "BLE" .-> BADGE
    AP <-. "BLE" .-> BADGE
  end
  SRC <--> COMMS
  COMMS <--> BR
  COMMS <--> AP
  CDM -.-> COMMS

Capabilities

  • Secure paging to the badge display — short messages shown on the badge's e-paper display, with delivery confirmation and user acknowledgement returned to the sender.
  • Calendar notifications — upcoming appointments and changes pushed to the badge from the user's calendar.
  • Messages from operational systems — nurse-call, lab-result and alarm systems as sources, through the service's integration points.
  • Identity-bound addressing — a message is sent to a person's Crayonic identity and delivered to the badge that CDM knows belongs to them.

Planned

  • Group and role broadcasts — send to roles, teams or zones defined in Crayonic Device Manager.
  • Location-aware targeting — with Crayonic RTLS, address everyone currently in an area (for example, a floor or ward).
  • Offline buffering — queue messages for a badge that is out of coverage and deliver when it reappears.
  • Delivery to the Crayonic Mobile ID Wallet — reach the user on their phone as well as on the badge.
  • Signed acknowledgements — acknowledgements carrying a device-signed receipt for audit.

Integration points

  • Crayonic Badge — displays messages and pages; the user acknowledges on the badge
  • Crayonic Bridge and Wi-Fi APs with BLE gateway — the delivery path
  • Crayonic Device Manager — badge and bridge inventory, who owns which badge; Comms depends on CDM (Option 3)
  • Crayonic RTLS — location-aware targeting (planned)
  • Your mail/calendar, nurse-call and alarm systems — message sources

What you deploy

The Comms service runs in Docker alongside CDM. BLE coverage is the prerequisite, exactly as for RTLS: bridges on workstations plus Wi-Fi APs with a BLE gateway or dedicated gateways for the areas you need to reach. Badges must have the display features required for paging.

Beta access

Contact Crayonic if you would like to pilot secure paging and notifications to the badge in your environment.