EDFORD - Finding an empty wheelchair or stretcher at a busy big-city medical center can be nearly as difficult as locating a hypodermic needle in a haystack.
Hospital staff in charge of moving patients from one area to another in the sprawling 10-story New York University Medical Center took it for granted that such a search would take five to 10 minutes, and longer if the search moved to another floor.
But after years of such headaches, Michael Chodrow, director of building services at NYU Medical, found a solution when the hospital was one of eight sites worldwide chosen by PinPoint Corp. of Bedford to test its local positioning system.
The system lets nurses and orderlies look at a building floor plan on a computer screen and see exactly where wheelchairs and stretchers are in use or parked throughout the hospital.
PinPoint's system functions in many ways like the global positioning systems that keep track of ships at sea and that drive the automobile systems which, after a destination is entered, tell motorists where to go and when to turn.
Items that need to be tracked in hospitals or other facilities are each fitted with a tag about the size of a cassette tape. Antennas are installed around a building or a confined outdoor space. The tags contain tiny battery-operated radios that send signals to the antennas, which pass the information to a desktop computer.
The result is a computer monitor display showing where items are within 10 feet of their exact location, either stationary or moving.
''The problem is that global positioning systems don't work in indoor applications,'' said PinPoint president Armando Viteri. ''And keeping track of equipment, materials, and just about anything else, especially in large facilities, can be a huge challenge.''
''I absolutely love it,'' Chodrow said of the device. ''We get 500 calls a day for escorts to move patients. Every minute counts. Everyone is trying to save time and reduce gaps.''
PinPoint spent two years testing and developing its system before putting its first product, called 3D-iD, on the market in January. Since then about 15 systems have been installed in facilities from Washington, D.C., to Australia. Viteri expects about 30 will be in use by the end of the year. Leasing a system for a midsize hospital or manufacturing plant costs about $50,000 a year, the company says.
Pinpoint is focusing its marketing efforts on health care, manufacturing, and warehouse distribution. ''Those markets have a few traits in common,'' said chief executive Ron Remy. ''The facilities tend to be large; they tend to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; and they tend to have a lot of assets and personnel in motion.''
Besides the NYU Medical Center, other users include the Austin Repatriation Center in Melbourne and Nortel Networks Wireless Development Center in Calgary, Canada. Since early 1997 PinPoint has raised $10 million in venture capital. The company is looking to raise $8 million more to bolster its engineering staff and keep up with manufacturing demands.
According to analyst Craig Mathias, at the Farpoint Group in Ashland, the market for products such as 3D-iD could reach $3.7 billion a year worldwide. Mathias said PinPoint has just two competitors.
''When I started looking at them, I didn't think that much of the product,'' Mathias said. ''But it's advanced quite steadily. There's a large need for accurate asset tracking equipment, and there are so many other things the technology can be used for.''
PinPoint is banking on that. ''We can think of uses from nuclear waste to casino gambling and amusement parks,'' Viteri said.
In Nortel's Calgary facility, the technology keeps track of research equipment. Engineers were hoarding gear they knew they would need for projects, and when other engineers couldn't find the equipment, they would request more be bought.
''They would hide away a spectrum analyzer because they knew they would need it the next week,'' said PinPoint vice president Paul Sereiko. ''We installed a system in their facility and now their engineers use it to locate test equipment in real time.''
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based AutoNation, the huge automotive retailer, is using PinPoint technology to allow customers to look at used cars without having to encounter salespeople. Customers enter the make and model of the cars they're looking for into a computer and 3D-iD directs them to where the cars are on the lot.
In Australia, 3D-iD keeps track of surgical equipment. Hospital officials there estimate PinPoint's technology will save them more than $1 million annually.
Besides tracking, PinPoint's local positioning system can be used to track goods or people. At Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., patients entering the emergency room are given tags, and the system monitors how long it takes to receive care after arrival.
It can also be used for security, triggering alarms if a tagged piece of equipment is taken out of a specified area, or if an unauthorized person takes an item.
The local positioning system was born when engineer Jay Werb, now PinPoint's chief technology officer, was asked by a health maintenance organization to help devise a system to track patient charts after doctors took them from the records room.
''Once the record left the room, if it was a single visit, then the record would go straight back to the record room,'' Werb said. ''But if it was a complicated case, then the record would get passed around from place to place. So once it left the record room, it was gone. This wasn't a very big HMO, and there were six people whose job it was to walk around with a list of records they really had to have.''
Bar-coding wasn't reliable because the codes aren't consistently scanned. But Werb found ideas for radio-based tracking systems had been floating around but had not been developed. He worked on a system for a year before approaching other engineers to develop it further. He also needed someone with business savvy to turn his idea into a business.
Werb hooked up with a neighbor, Remy, and PinPoint was born. Remy said what sets PinPoint apart from competitors is its ability to be adapted for many uses. PinPoint is encouraging partnerships. The company recently entered into an agreement with Texas-based wireless company Telxon Corp.
''It's one of those technologies that is tough to predict how it's going to evolve, but you know it's going to evolve into something huge,'' said Viteri. ''We hope one day it's something that you're going to take for granted.''
Someone who's not taking the technology for granted is Chodrow at NYU Medical. The yearlong trial of equipment there is almost over, and his only regret is that he didn't install it in all areas of the hospital. He's planning to lease the system he's been using, and expand it to include tagging 4,000 pieces of biomedical equipment.
