Whats is the difference between a UWB and BLE (used in SafeDistance) tracker?

There are many different technologies that can be used to measure the distance between 2 or more objects or persons.

In this article we will discuss two of the most common technolgies, UWB (Ultra WideBand) and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy).

UWB  has a higher positioning accuracy compared to BLE (typically lower than 0,5m for UWB compared to something like 2m for BLE) so that’s definitely an advantage of UWB.  

There are two reasons for choosing BLE over UWB in the SafeDistance solution:

1. UWB is much more power hungry than BLE. We have a UWB tag as well that is used for social distance and the battery in this device is about 10x more heavy than the battery in our BLE badge for a working time of only 12 hours. So UWB devices are in general bigger and heavier, compared to BLE devices.
2. UWB deployment is in general more expensive than BLE deployment. The UWB tags are more expensive, roughly double the price. The anchors in such UWB positioning system are also powered (and connected) by fixed lines instead of wireless like in our CloudGate Track positioning solution. So the cost of deployment is much higher as well because you need to install substantial volumes of PoE ethernet lines to power all those anchors.

UWB is typically only used for high-accuracy positioning in applications like warehouses where forklifts need to know exactly where something is positioned.  For other use cases, the high accuracy is overkill because it comes with a much higher cost and bulkier tags.

More information on the main differences between both technologies can be found in the White Paper from ResearchGate, here: