Experimenting an indoor bluetooth-based positioning service

The Bluetooth wireless technology is an emerging technology originally designed as a short-range connectivity solution for personal, portable, and handheld electronic devices. This paper briefly presents the functionality, and the architecture of an indoor positioning service based on this technology. Most of the design choices for the service have been strongly influenced by Bluetooth features. The effectiveness of the indoor positioning service is critically analyzed. Experimental and simulation results used for defining the policy of mobile device discovery are shown

Indoor Positioning for Monitoring Older Adults at Home: Wi-Fi and BLE Technologies in Real Scenarios

This paper presents our experience on a real case of applying an indoor localization system formonitoringolderadultsintheirownhomes. Sincethesystemisdesignedtobeusedbyrealusers, therearemanysituationsthatcannotbecontrolledbysystemdevelopersandcanbeasourceoferrors. This paper presents some of the problems that arise when real non-expert users use localization systems and discusses some strategies to deal with such situations. Two technologies were tested to provide indoor localization: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy. The results shown in the paper suggest that the Bluetooth Low Energy based one is preferable in the proposed task

Delivering real-world ubiquitous location systems

Location-enhanced applications are poised to become the first real-world example of ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we emphasize the practical aspects of getting location-enhanced applications deployed on existing devices, such as laptops, tablets, PDAs, and cell phones, without the need to purchase additional sensors or install special infrastructure. Our goal is to provide readers with an overview of the practical considerations that are currently being faced, and the research challenges that lie ahead. We ground the article with a summary of initial work on two deployments of location- enhanced computing: multi-player location-based games and a guide for the Edinburgh Festival

SILS: a Smart Indoors Localization Scheme based on on-the-go cooperative Smartphones networks using onboard Bluetooth, WiFi and GNSS

Seamless outdoors-indoors localization based on Smartphones sensors is essential to realize the full potential of Location Based Services. This paper proposes a Smart Indoors Localization Scheme (SILS) whereby participating Smartphones (SPs) in the same outdoors and indoors vicinity, form a Bluetooth network to locate the indoors SPs. To achieve this, SILS will perform 3 functions: (1) synchronize & locate all reachable WiFi Access Points (WAPs) with live GNSS time available on the outdoors SPs; 2) exchange a database of all SPs location and time-offsets; 3) calculate approximate location of indoor-SPs based on hybridization of GNSS, Bluetooth and WiFi measurements. These measurements includes a) Bluetooth to Bluetooth relative pseudo ranges of all participating SPs based on hop-synchronization and Master-Slave role switching to minimize the pseudo-ranges error, b) GNSS measured location of outdoors-SPs with good geometric reference points, and c) WAPs-SPs Trilateration estimates for deep indoors localization. Results, obtained from OPNET simulation and live trials of SILS built for various SPs network size and indoors/outdoors combinations scenarios, show that we can locate under 1 meter in near-indoors while accuracy of around 2-meters can be achieved when locating SPs at deep indoors situations. Better accuracy can be achieved when large numbers of SPs (up to 7) are available in the network/vicinity at any one time and when at least 4 of them have a good sky view outdoors

Towards an intelligent and supportive environment for people with physical or cognitive restrictions

AmbienNet environment has been developed with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of accessible intelligent environments designed to support people with disabilities and older persons living independently. Its main purpose is to examine in depth the advantages and disadvantages of pervasive supporting systems based on the paradigm of Ambient Intelligence for people with sensory, physical or cognitive limitations. Hence diverse supporting technologies and applications have been designed in order to test their accessibility, ease of use and validity. This paper presents the architecture of AmbienNet intelligent environment and an intelligent application to support indoors navigation for smart wheelchairs designed for validation purposes.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2006-15617-C[01,02,03

A Privacy Conscious Bluetooth Infrastructure for Location Aware Computing

We present a low cost and easily deployed infrastructure for location aware computing that is built using standard Bluetooth® technologies and personal computers. Mobile devices are able to determine their location to room-level granularity with existing bluetooth technology, and to even greater resolution with the use of the recently adopted bluetooth 1.2 specification, all while maintaining complete anonymity. Various techniques for improving the speed and resolution of the system are described, along with their tradeoffs in privacy. The system is trivial to implement on a large scale – our network covering 5,000 square meters was deployed by a single student over the course of a few days at a cost of less than US$1,000.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Traveled Distance Estimation Algorithm for Indoor Localization

This paper presents an ankle mounted Inertial Navigation System (INS) used to estimate the distance traveled by a pedestrian. This distance is estimated by the number of steps given by the user. The proposed method is based on force sensors to enhance the results obtained from an INS. Experimental results have shown that, depending on the step frequency, the traveled distance error varies between 2.7% and 5.6%

SSD: A robust RF location fingerprint addressing mobile devices' heterogeneity

Fingerprint-based methods are widely adopted for indoor localization purpose because of their cost-effectiveness compared to other infrastructure-based positioning systems. However, the popular location fingerprint, Received Signal Strength (RSS), is observed to differ significantly across different devices' hardware even under the same wireless conditions. We derive analytically a robust location fingerprint definition, the Signal Strength Difference (SSD), and verify its performance experimentally using a number of different mobile devices with heterogeneous hardware. Our experiments have also considered both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, as well as both Access-Point(AP)-based localization and Mobile-Node (MN)-assisted localization. We present the results of two well-known localization algorithms (K Nearest Neighbor and Bayesian Inference) when our proposed fingerprint is used, and demonstrate its robustness when the testing device differs from the training device. We also compare these SSD-based localization algorithms' performance against that of two other approaches in the literature that are designed to mitigate the effects of mobile node hardware variations, and show that SSD-based algorithms have better accuracy