Asset tracking has become a major area of interest and development in business over recent years. With businesses becoming increasingly mobile and with the development of GSM, GPS and GPRS technology, mobile assets tracking has come to the forefront of this field.
An assets tracking system usually consists of some form of base station which has some form of wireless communications link and a processing module to collect and decode the information it receives. This data can come from a variety of mobile devices, but commonly information is transmitted from a hand held barcode reader device which scans items, then sends the appropriate information to the central communications unit.
Widely used in the haulage and courier industries for tracking the contents of Lorries and vans to give details about deliveries including the product delivered times and places of delivery.
In order to ensure these systems are affective, the mobile readers used must be reliable; in order to ensure this, the battery used to power these devices also needs to be reliable. Previously NiCd or NiMH batteries have been used for such applications, but due to the increasing complexity of these devices, the power requirements have also increased. NiCd and NiMH can become subject to such high demand and use and their performance can diminish quickly.
The advent of Lithium technology, specifically rechargeable Lithium Ion technology has increased the capacity and reliability of rechargeable cells. This is the technology now being utilised by manufacturers of mobile assets tracking systems, taking advantage of the long shelf life, high capacity, high voltage and wide operational temperature characteristics of Lithium batteries.
