Building a software that uses telemetry data to track organizational assets in real-time

Founded in 2020, this cloud-based startup had a clear mission: to simplify contact tracing and asset management across industries. The company’s proprietary technology allows organizations to easily track and authorize people and equipment within their premises. Using telemetry data generated by sensors, the company’s software offers deep visibility and real-time monitoring of organizational assets, helping drive operational safety, efficiencies, and business continuity.

The challenge

The client’s main goal was to help industries regain and maintain their footing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve this, they wanted Forgeahead to build a customized software that could use data generated by telemetry tags and sensors placed on doors, and create a real-time map tracking the people and equipment within a particular facility.
The client also wanted the software to capture relevant data needed to perform contact tracing. Besides displaying the current contact status of an individual, the software was to help facility and risk managers retrospectively analyze who came in contact with who, thereby mitigating risks and allowing for a targeted intervention in case of an infectious disease spread.

Some of the
key challenges were:

Each sensor was expected to send attributes for approximately 20 fields every minute. With an average of 15-20 sensors in each site and with multiple sites for each client, the amount of data coming into the system was expected to be huge. The system needed to be able to receive data at high-velocity from multiple sensors and populate a consolidated dashboard in real-time.
The frequency of telemetry data received from each sensor varies significantly depending on factors such as employee shifts and working hours. The system needed to be able to scale flexibly to handle these fluctuations and ensure accurate, real-time tracking of people and equipment.
The client wanted the system to allow definitions for hot (red), warm (yellow) and cold (green) zones at each site their customers may have. Further, these customers were to be instantly alerted when a zone was breached based on an employee’s established permissions.

Why Amazon Web Services

Once the Forgeahead team realized there was a need for a solution that could be implemented quickly, utilized easily, and practiced effectively, they decided to go with AWS Serverless.
Based on the nature of the application, it was crucial for the system to be perfectly reliable and automatically scalable,’ says Zohair Hasan, Head of Product Engineering, Forgeahead Solutions. “Hence, we decided to build a serverless architecture and designed an infrastructure that is cost-efficient, highly-available and effortlessly scalable with the ease provided by AWS.
The experts at Forgeahead harnessed their deep domain expertise to develop a robust serverless architecture for the client. During the process, the following AWS services were used:

Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. It takes data from all the different sensors and makes it easily accessible to AWS Lambda.

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that was used for implementing the system’s backend. This service is also used for processing the vast amounts of data coming from all the sensors.

AWS Amplify serves the static frontend pages, while AWS SAM allows for easy deployment.

Amazon Aurora Serverless enables the client to run their database in the cloud without the need for managing any database capacity.

Amazon S3 is used for storing uploaded data.

Amazon SNS manages SMS and push notifications, while Amazon SES manages email notifications.

Bitbucket Pipeline is used for CI/CD, while Sonar is used for code coverage.

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the BENEFITS

The proprietary application allows easily authorization and tracking of access to facilities as well as within the facilities.

Each sensor is generating high-velocity telemetry data, and that data in turn is being used to create a blueprint of that facility. In addition to tracking interactions and movements of people and equipment, the solution can also be used to control access to certain areas or zones.
says Zohair Hasan, Head Product engineering
at Forgeahead Solutions.
The technology uses secure AWS servers in combination with SSL/TLS transport layer encryption.

This allows for a seamlessly integrated mobile and web application, complete with analytics, workflow, user and site management. The end result is a user-friendly web / mobile app that grants risk and site managers full visibility across any number of company sites.
Zohair Hasan, Head Product engineering
at Forgeahead Solutions, adds.
This allows for a seamlessly integrated mobile and web application, complete with analytics, workflow, user and site management. The end result is a user-friendly web / mobile app that grants risk and site managers full visibility across any number of company sites.

Benefits of AWS

Thanks to the powerful capabilities of AWS Serverless, the software is now able to store integration-state data in a quick-access format.

Training and badging of employees can be carried out using an intuitive, user-friendly interface

Adaptive, scalable technology that can monitor one room or hundreds of acres

Solution implementable across industries such as Construction, Education, Entertainment, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Mining, Oil & Gas, and many others

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