Herald use cases

Herald has a variety of real-world use cases to help in both public health and wider society.

These pages describe just a few of the broad areas Herald is being used in.

• Public Health - Herald started to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and has other public health use cases too
• Hospitals - From finding equipment to navigating around a hospital, Herald has many uses to aid staff, patients and visitors
• Public Safety - Beyond healthcare a variety of uses to help keep the public safe are possible
• Retail - Keeping track of expensive equipment, monitoring footfall in a store in a privacy preserving way, and assisting visitors to navigate around and interact with business in shopping centres, are just some of the potential uses here

Why adopt Herald?

Herald is a proven mission-critical API used by over 7.6 million people on their phones. There are many reasons to adopt Herald:-

• Herald is Open Source, with an open governance structure under Linux Foundation Public Health with no one company controlling the project’s direction, giving you peace of mind that the project is sustainable
• Herald is permissively licensed, allowing you to create both open source and commercial applications in both software and hardware, with improvements benefitting all adopting organisations
• Herald designs low-cost hardware, including eHealth wearables and beacons, that in bulk would cost only $25-45 per unit to make! This makes Internet of Things and eHealth solutions available to any organisation and country for the first time. We license our hardware under CERN’s Open Hardware License v2 Permissive, allowing our designs to be used in opensource and commercial applications.
• Herald is future proofed against technological change - Whilst our initial implementation was Bluetooth Low Energy we are now expanding into Bluetooth MESH, NFC and the new high performance UWB specification. The same Herald API insulates application developers from the underlying technology and abstracts away foibles and workarounds required for particular mobile phone Operating Systems and hardware limitations. We support Bluetooth Low Energy 4.0 and above, all iPhones with Bluetooth Low Energy, and Android phones back to 2010! No other Bluetooth layer we are aware of has such wide support. Herald can be deployed on over 98% of smartphones worldwide.
• Contribute to a healthier world - As a project within Linux Foundation Public Health, your support for Herald allows us to provide applications that make real differences to people lives, health and wellbeing. We’re committed to a healthier world where a person’s data is well protected and information is only shared with their consent.

Where to start?

Follow the links to the use cases above to find a place you can start exploring the use of Herald in your organisation.