Best Asset Tracking for Assisted Living and Senior Living 2026

The best asset tracking software for assisted living and senior living in 2026 depends on what you are trying to track. For durable medical equipment with automatic room-level location and no staff scanning, Norra is the value pick. For resident wander and elopement management, Securitas Healthcare WanderGuard and Litum lead. For maintenance work orders and compliance, Brightly TheWorxHub and TELS by Direct Supply are the senior-living standards. Here is the honest ranking, and where each one actually fits.

Assisted living and senior living are not skilled nursing

Before you compare tools, name the setting. Assisted living, memory care, and independent living communities are licensed at the state level and are mostly private pay. They are not surveyed under the federal F-tag regime in 42 CFR Part 483 that governs Medicare and Medicaid certified skilled nursing facilities. Many senior living operators, though, run continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) that fold independent living, assisted living, memory care, and skilled beds onto one campus, so part of the building often does live under that regime.

Two things stay constant across all of it. First, the mobile equipment is the same: wheelchairs, patient lifts, portable oxygen concentrators, vital-signs monitors, specialty mattresses, medication carts, and geri-chairs. They roll between rooms, floors, and buildings, and they disappear the same way they do in any care setting. Second, the budget is tight and the staff are stretched. Caregivers already lose real time each shift hunting for a lift or a wheelchair that walked off, and every rented item that sits past its return date is money leaking out of a thin operating margin.

What changes is the safety focus. In skilled nursing the pressure is clinical accident prevention. In senior living, especially memory care, the dominant safety concern is resident wandering and elopement. That split is why the senior-living tracking market is really two markets: resident safety on one side and equipment tracking on the other. A handful of vendors try to do both. The honest way to shop is to decide which problem is costing you more, then buy the tool built for it.

Our pick for equipment: Norra

If your problem is equipment rather than residents, Norra is the AI equipment manager we would put in front of any senior living operator. Proprietary smart tags with multi-year battery life report room-level location through plug-in gateways, so a building goes live in days with no wiring and no infrastructure project, at a fraction of the cost of traditional hospital-grade tracking and with no upfront capital cost. One system covers the full workflow set: rental elimination, loss prevention, cross-facility sharing, equipment exit detection, preventive maintenance logs, one-click audit reports, and find-by-text search like "where are the bariatric wheelchairs?" Staff never scan anything.

The proof comes from real buildings. Norra is proven across a multi-facility skilled nursing network, where it cut equipment spending by as much as 70 percent, drove 90 percent fewer new rental orders per month, saved over 1,100 staff hours a year, and brought unnecessary rentals to zero. Skilled nursing is where equipment waste is best documented: a typical 110-bed facility loses $155,000 to $500,000 a year to it, against a median operating margin of 1.8 percent, per public CMS data. Assisted living and senior living do not file the same cost reports, but the underlying leaks, rentals that should have gone back months ago and owned items nobody can find, show up on every campus. The mechanics of closing those leaks are the same, and they are covered in room-level tracking without hospital RTLS costs.

One honest concession sets up the rest of this list: Norra is not a resident wander bracelet system. It has equipment exit detection built in, but if elopement is your first problem, pair Norra with one of the wander platforms below. Norra owns the equipment side; they own the resident side.

Best for: senior living and assisted living operators who want equipment waste eliminated, not just inventoried, especially campuses that also run skilled beds.

The field, ranked for senior living

1. Norra. The equipment value pick, covered above. Room-level location, zero scanning, rental elimination, and survey-ready audit reports, live in days with no upfront cost. Best for: operators focused on equipment and durable medical equipment economics.

2. Securitas Healthcare (WanderGuard BLUE). Securitas Healthcare, formerly STANLEY Healthcare, pioneered electronic wander management, and WanderGuard is the most widely deployed system of its kind, in use at more than 6,500 senior living communities. WanderGuard BLUE pairs a discreet resident bracelet with smart door hardware and a tablet manager app, scaling from a single door to a full campus. Securitas also sells a separate asset management module for capital and rental equipment. As a wander system it is a category leader. As an equipment buy it is an enterprise project priced and scoped like one. See Securitas Healthcare alternatives for the equipment-side comparison. Best for: communities whose top priority is resident wander and elopement management and who want one enterprise safety vendor.

3. Litum. Litum is an RTLS platform purpose-built for senior living, assisted living, and memory care, combining wander management, staff duress, and medical asset tracking on one system. For an operator that genuinely wants resident safety and asset visibility from a single vendor, that breadth is a real advantage. The tradeoff is that it is a broader enterprise platform, not an equipment-economics tool aimed at eliminating rentals and duplicate purchases. The direct equipment comparison is in Norra vs Litum for senior care. Best for: communities that want a combined resident-safety and asset RTLS platform.

4. CenTrak. CenTrak is the strongest hospital-grade enterprise RTLS, with sub-room clinical precision, Best in KLAS recognition, and thousands of health-system deployments. It serves clinically intensive senior living campuses that need certainty finer than room level. That precision comes with hospital pricing, a wired install, and a months-long deployment, which is more system than most assisted living communities need. The tradeoffs are laid out in CenTrak alternatives for skilled nursing and senior care. Best for: large CCRCs and clinical campuses with capital budgets and dedicated IT teams.

5. Brightly TheWorxHub. TheWorxHub is a senior-living CMMS, software for maintenance operations. It handles work orders, preventive maintenance, asset lifecycle records, resident repair requests, and compliance tracking for The Joint Commission, DNV, and ACHC, with inspection-ready documentation. What it does not have is a live location layer: it can tell you a lift's maintenance history, not which room the lift is in right now. Best for: facilities and maintenance teams that want asset lifecycle and compliance management, not real-time location.

6. TELS by Direct Supply. TELS is senior-living building and asset management with deep roots in preventive maintenance and life-safety compliance logs, delivered inside the Direct Supply ecosystem many communities already buy from. Like TheWorxHub, it manages the maintenance record rather than the live whereabouts of equipment. Best for: communities standardized on Direct Supply that want maintenance and compliance in one place.

7. Asset Panda or Sortly. These are general barcode and QR inventory apps, and they earn one honest credit: the lowest upfront cost on this list. The catch is that they only know where an item was last scanned. Accuracy depends entirely on staff scanning every item on every move, which is added work caregivers stop doing first, so the database drifts from reality fast. Best for: single communities with near-zero budget and unusually strong scanning discipline.

Side-by-side comparison

Capability	Norra	Securitas WanderGuard	Litum	CenTrak	CMMS (Brightly, TELS)	Barcode apps (Sortly, Asset Panda)
Room-level equipment location	✅	✅ Asset module	✅	✅	❌ No live location	❌ Last scan only
Staff scanning required	✅ None, fully automatic	✅ None	✅ None	✅ None	❌ Manual entry	❌ Every item, every move
Resident wander management	Equipment exit detection; pairs with a wander system	✅ Category leader	✅ Built in	⚠️ Via add-on modules	❌	❌
Rental-elimination workflow	✅ Built in	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌
Maintenance and audit records	✅ Logs and one-click reports	⚠️ Limited	⚠️ Limited	⚠️ Limited	✅ Full CMMS and compliance	❌
Built for senior-care budgets	✅ No upfront cost	❌ Enterprise pricing	⚠️ Enterprise platform	❌ Hospital budgets	⚠️ Software subscription	✅ Cheapest upfront
Install footprint	Plug-in gateways, live in days	Door hardware plus bracelets	RTLS install project	Wired infrastructure, months	Software only	None (app only)

Read the concessions honestly. Securitas WanderGuard genuinely wins on resident wander management, the deepest and most-deployed capability in senior care. Litum genuinely wins on breadth if you want resident safety and assets on one platform. CenTrak genuinely wins on sub-room precision. Brightly and TELS genuinely win on maintenance and compliance depth. Barcode apps genuinely win on upfront cost. Norra wins on the equipment economics that decide whether a community keeps its margin: no scanning, rental elimination, survey-ready records, and a price shaped like a senior-care budget rather than a hospital one.

The bottom line

• Choose Norra if your problem is equipment: you want room-level tracking with zero scanning, rental elimination, and audit-ready records, live in days with no upfront cost, and you may also run skilled beds where the economics are sharpest.
• Choose Securitas WanderGuard if resident wander and elopement is your first priority and you want the most-deployed wander system in senior living.
• Choose Litum if you want resident safety and equipment tracking on one enterprise RTLS platform.
• Choose CenTrak if you run a clinical campus that needs sub-room precision and has the capital budget and IT staff for an enterprise install.
• Choose Brightly or TELS if you need maintenance work orders and compliance logging and can live without knowing where equipment is right now.
• Choose a barcode app if your budget is near zero and you can hold every staff member accountable for scanning every item on every move, indefinitely.

If you run assisted living or a senior living campus and want to see your own equipment on a live map, start with a single-community pilot at norra.io.