Travellers spend their lives discovering new places and meeting new people from all around the world. It can be such a wonderful experience, but sometimes it can turn into a disaster when your luggage gets lost. In 2014 alone, more than 24 million pieces of baggage were lost. Fortunately, 95% of them were found and returned to their owners. However, that leaves more than 1 million items of baggage that have never been recovered.
Now Samsonite introduces Track&Go, the definitive solution to easily and privately find your lost luggage.
In this project, Accent Systems has acted as a hardware partner for Samsonite, the world’s leading luggage brand, performing a beacon luggage development: from hardware design, firmware development, and manufacturing. In the software side, this project has count with ‘In the Pocket’ as the developers of the app.
This launch represents a turning point respect to the existing smart suitcases in the market, due to the fact that is the first one that uses Eddystone-EID (Ephemeral ID) to securely locate your lost luggage, thanks to the open beacon format from Google.
Now Samsonite introduces Track&Go, the definitive solution to easily and privately find your lost luggage.
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How does TRACK&GO work?
Accent Systems has built the Bluetooth Low Energy beacon inside the suitcase which use the new open Eddystone frame type, the Ephemeral Identifier (EID),recently released by Google. In a traveling context, this will help you to quickly recover your luggage without taking the risk of being identified by malicious third parties. All that the traveller has to do is register as the owner of the luggage on the Travlr app from Samsonite, allowing it to start sending encrypted and rotating IDs.
“This will help you to quickly recover your luggage without taking the risk of being identified by malicious third parties”
You can easily understand how Track&Go works in the following video:
In the event that the luggage goes missing, the owner can flag it as lost on the app. After this, Travlr leverages its user base to help the owner find it, privately and securely allowing anyone with the app installed comes within 70 meters of the luggage reported as lost. Then the app picks up the luggage’s Eddystone-EID, an encrypted signal emitted by the luggage which identifies it as being the piece reported as lost and which makes it impossible to track by third parties. This triggers a notification, which specifies the time and exact location of the suitcase, to be sent out only to the luggage’s registered owner.
Also, user can easily check the location of the suitcase within a distance of 70 meters, and also be notified if it is being moved closer or further away from the user.
Now, thanks to Eddystone-EID it’s already possible to establish a secure connection between your lost luggage and the app installed in other user’s smartphones, helping the owner to easily find their belongings and reducing the stress of travel and makes travellers’ experience safer.
The next steps of TRACK&GO
The bigger the community, the higher the chances of retrieving a lost suitcase. Because this the next step will be collaborating with airports and baggage handling companies to grow the network devices that help retrieve lost luggage. Also, in the near future, anyone with a smartphone could be able to help retrieve lost suitcases.
The first Track&Go suitcases are expected to hit the European market end of 2016.
You can learn more about Eddystone-EID in this post.
Why Accent Systems
We are a Spanish hardware company that offers wireless electronic solutions. With a global service approach (we have worked with companies in the USA, Germany, Turkey and Brazil, among other countries), we help organizations to create great innovative products in its landing on Internet of Things, going from the idea to mass production, covering all the processes between in our facilities here in Barcelona.
Mainly we are well known for our expertise in beacon hardware thanks to our own beacon, the iBKS BLE beacon, as the most flexible beacon of the market. However, we understand this technology as more than a ‘spam machine’. The potential of the beacon technology is only limited by the imagination. Just take a lookhow a ‘simple’ beacon can become a smart key fob, like we did with Volkswagen.
Nevertheless, we have more than 9 years of experience developing and manufacturing wireless devices, mostly with Bluetooth Low Energy, but also with other technologies like: WiFi, GPRS, 3G, 4G and Sigfox, among others; with application in different fields: products and systems for the automotive sector, electronic equipment for the medical sector, tracking systems and fleet control, and smartphone and tablets accessories.
If you are interested in develop an Internet of Things project, just contact us or visit our web site: www.accent-systems.com. We will be glad to talk with you.