In the not-too-distant future, the tool you’re using will be able to alert you that it’s due for calibration or warn you that you are taking it into an area where its use might be unsafe. It will do this by communicating directly with your smartphone.

Research is underway on these capabilities, which will build on a long history of tool tracking advances. Tool management first moved from ledger books and whiteboards and began taking advantage of technology with the use of barcodes in the early 1990s. Scanned with a reader, barcodes provided an efficient way to check tools out of and back into a warehouse or tool crib.

A more recent advance is the use of RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology. A small chip, often referred to as a “tag,” is attached to a tool and can respond when energized by the beam of an RFID reader from up to 15 feet away for mid-range “passive” RFID tags and further (up to 300 feet) with larger “active” tags that have an embedded battery.

Today, however, a technology called Bluetooth low energy (BLE) is showing great promise for tool tracking and management. Similar to the Bluetooth you might use to wirelessly connect your tablet to an external speaker for playing music, BLE lets two devices communicate, but in this case in a way that allows for considerably lower power consumption.

Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and other operating systems and devices natively support what is marketed as Bluetooth Smart. That integration ability has developers envisioning all kinds of scenarios where tools transmit data to a smartphone or tablet to increase efficiency, enhance productivity, and improve safety for workers. For example:

• Sharing a link to online documentation or best practices for using a tool
• Warning a worker that a tool is not “intrinsically safe” and cannot be used in an area they are entering
• Broadcasting its location information to eliminate the need for a worker to pick it up and scan it to verify its whereabouts

BLE has tremendous potential to change the construction industry, both with the features we are talking about today and with functionality that has yet to be imagined.

Don Kafka is the founder and CEO of ToolWatch.

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