Litum is a real-time location systems company, active in the field for 22 years per its own home page, and its forklift product is one application of that platform rather than a standalone gadget. The system, called PathAware, is a collision and proximity warning package for industrial vehicles, and the location infrastructure underneath it shapes both what the product can do and what it costs to install. Litum keeps a United States office on State Street in Boston, which matters for support and reference site access. This review covers what the vendor publishes, and it sells none of these systems.
What the forklift offer contains
PathAware combines radar-based detection with AI-enhanced sensors and UWB-enabled vehicle tags. The vendor describes 360-degree awareness that spots people, vehicles and obstacles, including stationary objects, and issues alerts based on time to collision rather than a fixed distance. No line of sight is required, and in the tagless deployment mode pedestrians carry no wearables at all, which removes the single biggest failure point of tag-based systems: the worker who never picked up a tag.
Litum offers three deployment modes on the same product page. Tagless radar detection protects people who carry nothing. Tag-based mode adds UWB tags where the site wants identity and zone history. Full RTLS integration ties the safety alerts into the location platform, so the same installation tracks assets, staff and events. Buyers can start with the first mode and expand later, which is the practical selling point: the system scales with need rather than forcing a full platform purchase up front.
Tagless radar versus tags and cameras
The technology family determines the trade-offs. Camera systems such as Blaxtair and the AiVA module of Speedshield need an unobstructed view and reasonable light, and they struggle with occlusion behind racking. Tag-based proximity systems such as HIT-NOT and SensorZone work in any light but only protect people wearing tags. Radar detection sits between the two: it needs no sightline and, in tagless mode, no participation from the pedestrian, which is why Litum highlights stationary object detection, something tag systems cannot see at all. See the pedestrian detection and proximity detection system pages for the underlying comparison, and treat range, false-alert rate and detection of crouching or seated people as claims to verify in your own aisles.
The RTLS platform underneath
Litum’s broader platform is where its history shows. The company publishes 22 years of real-time location work across asset tracking, worker safety, emergency mustering, staff duress and healthcare applications such as patient flow and wander management, with hybrid indoor and outdoor tracking and integration with enterprise, access control and warehouse systems. For a forklift buyer that means two things. First, the safety purchase can share infrastructure with an asset and fleet tracking program, which changes the return on investment calculation entirely. Second, the site pays for location infrastructure, not just a warning light, so a detection-only need in a single aisle is probably over-served. Work through the system selection guide before letting the platform story drive the scope.
Claims worth verifying
The Litum product page publishes market-level figures attributed to OSHA and NSC data: 34,815 serious forklift injuries a year, an average cost of $47,915 per injury and $1,389,915 per fatality. Those are aggregate estimates on a different counting basis from the severe-injury reports this site publishes, 5,154 forklift-involved reports across 2015–2025 from the federal 24-hour reporting program, so treat both as planning context rather than a forecast for any single facility, as explained in the accident statistics guide and the methodology page. On brand diligence: the search results for the company name surface Gartner reviews and MHI membership alongside its own site (DataForSEO SERP snapshot, 2026-09-10), and the brand term carries a keyword difficulty near 47 of 100 (DataForSEO Labs, 2026-09-10), while the category demand the product answers, pedestrian detection at about 90 monthly US searches and collision avoidance at about 110, is what most buyers actually type.
Who it suits
Litum fits an operation that already wants to know where its people and assets are, or one with a serious visitor and contractor flow where tagging every pedestrian is not realistic. It also handles mixed indoor and outdoor yards, where pure camera systems lose coverage. It suits less well a small site with a handful of trucks and a detection-only budget, where a simpler retrofit camera or tag system costs less. Whatever the shortlist, pilot the finalist in your worst aisle for a month and count near misses and false alerts before and after. Our risk scorer will tell you which aisle that is, the systems index compares every category side by side, and the quote form sends all vendors the same scope so the numbers come back comparable. Company details are on the directory page, and state-level injury context is in the state pages.