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

Overview of positioning technologies from fitness-to-purpose point of view

Even though Location Based Services (LBSs) are being more and more widely-used and this shows a promising future, there are still many challenges to deal with, such as privacy, reliability, accuracy, cost of service, power consumption and availability. There is still no single low-cost positioning technology which provides position of its users seamlessly indoors and outdoors with an acceptable level of accuracy and low power consumption. For this reason, fitness of positioning service to the purpose of LBS application is an important parameter to be considered when choosing the most suitable positioning technology for an LBS. This should be done for any LBS application, since each application may need different requirements. Some location-based applications, such as location-based advertisements or Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN), do not need very accurate positioning input data, while for some others, e.g. navigation and tracking services, highly-accurate positioning is essential. This paper evaluates different positioning technologies from fitness-to-purpose point of view for two different applications, public transport information and family/friend tracking

An IoT based Virtual Coaching System (VSC) for Assisting Activities of Daily Life

Nowadays aging of the population is becoming one of the main concerns of theworld. It is estimated that the number of people aged over 65 will increase from 461million to 2 billion in 2050. This substantial increment in the elderly population willhave significant consequences in the social and health care system. Therefore, in thecontext of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has beenemerging as a new research area to address problems related to the aging of the population. AAL technologies based on embedded devices have demonstrated to be effectivein alleviating the social- and health-care issues related to the continuous growing of theaverage age of the population. Many smart applications, devices and systems have beendeveloped to monitor the health status of elderly, substitute them in the accomplishment of activities of the daily life (especially in presence of some impairment or disability),alert their caregivers in case of necessity and help them in recognizing risky situations.Such assistive technologies basically rely on the communication and interaction be-tween body sensors, smart environments and smart devices. However, in such contextless effort has been spent in designing smart solutions for empowering and supportingthe self-efficacy of people with neurodegenerative diseases and elderly in general. Thisthesis fills in the gap by presenting a low-cost, non intrusive, and ubiquitous VirtualCoaching System (VCS) to support people in the acquisition of new behaviors (e.g.,taking pills, drinking water, finding the right key, avoiding motor blocks) necessary tocope with needs derived from a change in their health status and a degradation of theircognitive capabilities as they age. VCS is based on the concept of extended mind intro-duced by Clark and Chalmers in 1998. They proposed the idea that objects within theenvironment function as a part of the mind. In my revisiting of the concept of extendedmind, the VCS is composed of a set of smart objects that exploit the Internet of Things(IoT) technology and machine learning-based algorithms, in order to identify the needsof the users and react accordingly. In particular, the system exploits smart tags to trans-form objects commonly used by people (e.g., pillbox, bottle of water, keys) into smartobjects, it monitors their usage according to their needs, and it incrementally guidesthem in the acquisition of new behaviors related to their needs. To implement VCS, thisthesis explores different research directions and challenges. First of all, it addresses thedefinition of a ubiquitous, non-invasive and low-cost indoor monitoring architecture byexploiting the IoT paradigm. Secondly, it deals with the necessity of developing solu-tions for implementing coaching actions and consequently monitoring human activitiesby analyzing the interaction between people and smart objects. Finally, it focuses on the design of low-cost localization systems for indoor environment, since knowing theposition of a person provides VCS with essential information to acquire information onperformed activities and to prevent risky situations. In the end, the outcomes of theseresearch directions have been integrated into a healthcare application scenario to imple-ment a wearable system that prevents freezing of gait in people affected by Parkinson\u2019sDisease

Adaptive Training of Video Sets for Image Recognition on Mobile Phones

We present an enhancement towards adaptive video training for PhoneGuide, a digital museum guidance system for ordinary camera–equipped mobile phones. It enables museum visitors to identify exhibits by capturing photos of them. In this article, a combined solution of object recognition and pervasive tracking is extended to a client–server–system for improving data acquisition and for supporting scale–invariant object recognition

A Meta-Review of Indoor Positioning Systems

An accurate and reliable Indoor Positioning System (IPS) applicable to most indoor scenarios has been sought for many years. The number of technologies, techniques, and approaches in general used in IPS proposals is remarkable. Such diversity, coupled with the lack of strict and verifiable evaluations, leads to difficulties for appreciating the true value of most proposals. This paper provides a meta-review that performed a comprehensive compilation of 62 survey papers in the area of indoor positioning. The paper provides the reader with an introduction to IPS and the different technologies, techniques, and some methods commonly employed. The introduction is supported by consensus found in the selected surveys and referenced using them. Thus, the meta-review allows the reader to inspect the IPS current state at a glance and serve as a guide for the reader to easily find further details on each technology used in IPS. The analyses of the meta-review contributed with insights on the abundance and academic significance of published IPS proposals using the criterion of the number of citations. Moreover, 75 works are identified as relevant works in the research topic from a selection of about 4000 works cited in the analyzed surveys

Indoor location based services challenges, requirements and usability of current solutions

Indoor Location Based Services (LBS), such as indoor navigation and tracking, still have to deal with both technical and non-technical challenges. For this reason, they have not yet found a prominent position in people’s everyday lives. Reliability and availability of indoor positioning technologies, the availability of up-to-date indoor maps, and privacy concerns associated with location data are some of the biggest challenges to their development. If these challenges were solved, or at least minimized, there would be more penetration into the user market. This paper studies the requirements of LBS applications, through a survey conducted by the authors, identifies the current challenges of indoor LBS, and reviews the available solutions that address the most important challenge, that of providing seamless indoor/outdoor positioning. The paper also looks at the potential of emerging solutions and the technologies that may help to handle this challenge

Sisäpaikannus: Teknologiat ja käyttötapaukset vähittäiskaupan alalla

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) are required in buildings to offer the possibility to position people and assets indoors, as the widely utilized GPS signal cannot penetrate through walls. IPSs are already implemented in many indoor environments. Several indoor positioning technologies exist, but none of them is clearly a dominant technology over the others. Consequently, this study identifies the different kinds of indoor positioning technologies and methods as well as the use cases they are used in. For this purpose, six companies using or developing indoor positioning systems were interviewed. The interviews were held in person, and they were 60-minute long semi-structured interviews with a set of questions in Appendix 1. In addition, two companies interested in indoor positioning, and that are working with retail were interviewed in 30-minute semi-structured interviews with questions in Appendix 2. Indoor positioning is employed in the interviewed companies to help users to navigate in public spaces; raise employee satisfaction in an office; improve customer service and satisfaction in malls, stores, and restaurants and develop processes and safety in warehouses. These different use cases have distinctive specifications and needs for indoor positioning, and thus, there is not a simple solution as to which technology is the right choice for a particular use case. Nevertheless, three points affecting the choice of indoor positioning technology were concluded from the interviews: 1) the accuracy of a technology, 2) whether the positioning happens through a tag or a mobile device, and 3) if positioning infrastructure, such as anchor nodes, can be installed in the building. Finally, based on the interviews, a suggested model for an indoor positioning system for a retail company is presented in a form of a Value Network Configuration.Sisäpaikannusjärjestelmiä tarvitaan rakennuksissa, jotta ihmisiä ja tavaroita voidaan paikantaa sisätiloissa, sillä ulkona yleisesti käytetty GPS signaali ei pysty läpäisemään rakennusten seiniä. Vaikka sisäpaikannusta käytetäänkin jo useissa eri sisätiloissa ja useita eri sisäpaikannusteknologioita on olemassa, mikään niistä ei ole selvästi hallitseva teknologia. Tässä tutkimuksessa tunnistetaan eri sisäpaikannusteknologiat ja –tekniikat kuten myös niitä hyödyntävät käyttötapaukset. Tätä varten haastateltiin kuutta eri yritystä, jotka käyttävät tai tarjoavat sisäpaikannusjärjestelmiä. Haastattelut olivat puolistrukturoituja, kestivät 60 minuuttia ja ne pidettiin kasvotusten. Lisäksi haastateltiin 30 minuutin puolistrukturoiduissa haastatteluissa kahta kaupan alaan liittyvää yritystä, jotka ovat kiinnostuneita sisäpaikannuksesta. Haastattelukysymykset ovat liitteissä 1 ja 2. Sisäpaikannusta käytetään haastatelluissa yrityksissä käyttäjien navigoinnin helpottamiseksi julkisissa tiloissa, työntekijöiden tyytyväisyyden kasvattamiseen toimistossa, asiakaspalvelun ja asiakkaiden tyytyväisyyden parantamiseen ostoskeskuksissa, kaupoissa ja ravintoloissa sekä prosessien ja turvallisuuden kehittämiseen varastoissa. Näillä eri käyttötapauksilla on hyvin erilaiset vaatimukset ja tarpeet sisäpaikannukselle, joten ei ole olemassa vain yhtä hyvää teknologista ratkaisua tietylle käyttötapaukselle. Haastatteluista oli kuitenkin mahdollista muodostaa kolme sisäpaikannusteknologian valintaan vaikuttavaa asiaa: 1) sisäpaikannusteknologian tarkkuus, 2) tapahtuuko paikannus mobiililaitteen vai käyttäjän kantaman tunnisteen kautta ja 3) voiko paikannusjärjestelmän tukiasemia asentaa rakennukseen. Lopuksi esitellään ehdotelma sisäpaikannusmallista arvoverkkokonfiguraatiolla (Value Network Configuration) vähittäiskaupan alan yritykselle haastatteluiden perusteella

COVID-19 & privacy: Enhancing of indoor localization architectures towards effective social distancing

Abstract The way people access services in indoor environments has dramatically changed in the last year. The countermeasures to the COVID-19 pandemic imposed a disruptive requirement, namely preserving social distance among people in indoor environments. We explore in this work the possibility of adopting the indoor localization technologies to measure the distance among users in indoor environments. We discuss how information about people's contacts collected can be exploited during three stages: before, during, and after people access a service. We present a reference architecture for an Indoor Localization System (ILS), and we illustrate three representative use-cases. We derive some architectural requirements, and we discuss some issues that concretely cope with the real installation of an ILS in real-world settings. In particular, we explore the privacy and trust reputation of an ILS, the discovery phase, and the deployment of the ILS in real-world settings. We finally present an evaluation framework for assessing the performance of the architecture proposed