Omaya Scout

Omaya Scout is a small phone app, separate from Omaya Mobile, with one job: keeping your Bluetooth tag working when you are outside the building.

Indoors, Omaya's gateways hear your tag and know which room you are in. Step outside — to the car park, another site, a client's office, the road between — and no gateway hears it any more. With Scout on your phone, the phone hears the tag instead, and sends the phone's own GPS position with it. Your tag keeps a trail outdoors, without a GPS tracker and without any extra hardware.

What it does

• Listens for your organisation's tags. The app downloads the list of tags your organisation publishes to Scout, and checks it again every day. It hears any of them nearby, not only yours.
• Sends where it heard them. Each time it hears a tag, it sends the phone's position and how strong the signal was. Omaya turns that into a position for the tag: the phone's accuracy, plus how far the tag can be from the phone (1 to 60 m, judged from the signal).
• Keeps the tag's readings fresh. Battery and sensor readings the tag broadcasts are passed on, so its battery level stays current while it is away.
• Keeps going offline. Without a connection, the phone keeps what it heard and sends it when it is back online, up to 24 hours later.
• Runs in the background. Once it is scouting, you do not need to keep it on screen. On iPhone, leave it in the background rather than swiping it away in the app switcher: a swiped-away app stops listening.
• Tells Omaya it is alive. About every 15 minutes it says it is still running, whether Bluetooth is on and whether scouting is on. That is how Phones gone quiet on the Scout page knows a phone has stopped.

What it does not do

• No account, no sign-in. The phone makes up an anonymous ID the first time it runs. It is not tied to your name; your administrator sees which phone carries whose tag only from where the tag was placed.
• It does not place you in a room. Indoors, the gateways still decide.
• A press relayed by a phone does not page anyone. A button press the phone passes on is recorded, but fires no rule, button-press alert or panic page. Positions are different: they cross geofences like any GPS position.
• It sends only when it hears a Bluetooth tag. Anything it hears that is not one of your organisation's tags is dropped by Omaya unread. Apart from that, the 15-minute check-in carries only the phone's latest position, which replaces the one before it.

Getting started

1. Install Omaya Scout on your phone. Your Omaya administrator tells you where to get it. It runs on iPhone and Android.
2. Open it and allow Bluetooth and Location. For Location, choose Allow all the time (Android) or Always (iPhone), or it stops listening when the screen is off.
3. Switch Scouting on.
4. Choose how often it reports: from Live tracking, every 10 seconds, to Battery saver, every 5 minutes. The default is every 30 seconds.
5. Walk outside with your tag for a few minutes. On the web, your administrator sees you under Monitor → Scout (phones) as Outside now, then Covered.

Keep it running

Battery optimisation on some Android phones stops background apps. If your administrator says your phone has gone quiet, set Omaya Scout to Unrestricted (or Don't optimise) in the phone's battery settings, and check Bluetooth and Location are still on.

When it is useful

Situation	What Scout gives
A technician drives between client sites	Their badge keeps a trail on the road and at each site, and a geofence rule can tell the dispatcher when they leave one
Staff work across a campus with gateways only in the main building	The walk between buildings is no longer a gap in the trail
A tool kit or trolley travels in a van	The driver's phone carries the kit's tag, so the kit's trail follows the van
A visit to another site with no gateways	Time on that site shows in Outdoor Activity and GPS Replay from the phone's positions
A lone worker outside	Their last outdoor position is known. For an alarm that pages someone outside, use a tracker with its own SIM: phone-relayed presses do not page

For the administrator

• Switching it on. Scout is switched on per organisation by your Omaya contact. Tags bound to a person are published to Scout where your contact has turned that on, which is what lets each person's own phone cover their tag.
• Who still needs it. Monitor → Scout (phones) lists each tag holder a phone has heard: Covered, Outside now, Phone gone quiet, or Seen at a site only (no phone of their own yet). Work down No phone yet. See See who is covered outdoors.
• iPhones and new tags. An iPhone recognises a tag by the ID it broadcasts, which Omaya learns from your gateways. A tag that has never been past a gateway is found by Android phones only until it has. Give each tag its own ID: two tags left on the same factory ID cannot be told apart.
• The data. Scout positions follow your organisation's data retention, like every other GPS position. For building your own finder app on the same interface, see Pushing data in.