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

Influence of Information System on Emergency Department Shift Leaders’ Mobility

Emergency departments are hospital units for patients, who need emergency and acute care. Due to the state of patients, shift leader nurses and physicians need to do important decisions concerning patients’ treatment and care, quickly and efficiently. To be able to do that, they have to get needed information easily and efficiently. That is called knowledge-based leadership. When knowledge-based leadership is successful, the organisations’ information and knowledge are processed in a way, that they may be exploited in a best possible way. Unfortunately, nowadays the situation is not ideal in emergency departments, even though a lot of money has been invested in new information systems. Staff dissatisfaction with existing information systems have been reported and can be seen on staff satisfaction. On the other hand, there is not much research on how the information systems impact on shift leader nurses’ and physicians’ work. A quasi-experimental study was done in the years 2015 – 2016 in emergency departments in three central hospitals in Finland exploring the movement patterns of the shift leader professionals before and after implementation of a new information system in on unit, called intervention unit. Data was collected with Bluetooth beacons installed in different hospital rooms and corridors and with smartphones carried by shift leader nurses and physicians. Improving the knowledge management of leaders with new information systems, it is expected, that it decreases the effort needed to seek information to support decision-making. However, the result was not so unambiguous. The movement patterns changed, but they changed also in control units. A new information system can influence on hospital leader shift personnel mobility. Unfortunately, the lack of data made it impossible to count and compare actual walked distances. There should be more data – that is – from every day, every shift and every shift leader professional around the clock. Only that way, the comparison would be reliable. The mobility data from hospitals was already collected, when this thesis was written, so collecting the data was not part of this thesis. Keywords: information system evaluation, indoor positioning, Bluetooth beaco

An indoor positioning system using Bluetooth Low Energy

In this paper, we present a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based indoor positioning system developed for monitoring the daily living pattern of old people (e.g. people living with dementia) or individuals with disabilities. The proposed sensing system is composed of multiple sensors that are installed in different locations in a home environment. The specific location of the user in the building has been pre-recorded into the proposed sensing system that captures the raw Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) from the BLE beacon that is attached on the user. Two methods are proposed to determine the indoor location and the tracking of the users: a trilateration-based method and fingerprinting-based method. Experiments have been carried out in different home environments to verify the proposed system and methods. The results show that our system is able to accurately track the user location in home environments and can track the living patterns of the user which, in turn, may be used to infer the health status of the user. Our results also show that the positions of the BLE beacons on the user and different quality of BLE beacons do not affect the tracking accuracy

Digitalization of Retail Stores using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons

This thesis explores the domains of retail stores and the Internet of Things, with a focus on Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. It investigates how one can use the technology to improve physical stores, for the benefit of both the store and the customers. It does this by going through literature and information from academia and the relevant industry. Additionally, an interview with an expert in the retail domain is conducted, and a survey consisting of a series of interviews and questionnaire with what can be considered experts in the IT domain. A prototype app called Stass is developed, the app demonstrates some of the usages of the technology and is also used for evaluating the performance of the beacons.Masteroppgave i informasjonsvitenskapINFO39

A Smartphone-Based System for Outdoor Data Gathering Using a Wireless Beacon Network and GPS Data: From Cyber Spaces to Senseable Spaces

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and mobile devices are deeply influencing all facets of life, directly affecting the way people experience space and time. ICTs are also tools for supporting urban development, and they have also been adopted as equipment for furnishing public spaces. Hence, ICTs have created a new paradigm of hybrid space that can be defined as Senseable Spaces. Even if there are relevant cases where the adoption of ICT has made the use of public open spaces more “smart”, the interrelation and the recognition of added value need to be further developed. This is one of the motivations for the research presented in this paper. The main goal of the work reported here is the deployment of a system composed of three different connected elements (a real-world infrastructure, a data gathering system, and a data processing and analysis platform) for analysis of human behavior in the open space of Cardeto Park, in Ancona, Italy. For this purpose, and because of the complexity of this task, several actions have been carried out: the deployment of a complete real-world infrastructure in Cardeto Park, the implementation of an ad-hoc smartphone application for the gathering of participants’ data, and the development of a data pre-processing and analysis system for dealing with all the gathered data. A detailed description of these three aspects and the way in which they are connected to create a unique system is the main focus of this paper.This work has been supported by the Cost Action TU1306, called CYBERPARKS: Fostering knowledge about the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies and Public Spaces supported by strategies to improve their use and attractiveness, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the ESPHIA project (ref. TIN2014-56042-JIN) and the TARSIUS project (ref. TIN2015-71564-C4-4-R), and the Basque Country Department of Education under the BLUE project (ref. PI-2016-0010). The authors would also like to thank the staff of UbiSive s.r.l. for the support in developing the application

Smartphone indoor positioning based on enhanced BLE beacon multi-lateration

In this paper, we introduce a smartphone indoor positioning method using bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacon multilateration. At first, based on signal strength analysis, we construct a distance calculation model for BLE beacons. Then, with the aims to improve positioning accuracy, we propose an improved lateral method (range-based method) which is applied for 4 nearby beacons. The method is intended to design a real-time system for some services such as emergency assistance, personal localization and tracking, location-based advertising and marketing, etc. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high accuracy when compared with the state of the art lateral methods such as geometry-based (conventional trilateration), least square estimation-based (LSE-based) and weighted LSE-based

Behavior modeling for a beacon-based indoor location system

In this work we performed a comparison between two different approaches to track a person in indoor environments using a locating system based on BLE technology with a smartphone and a smartwatch as monitoring devices. To do so, we provide the system architecture we designed and describe how the different elements of the proposed system interact with each other. Moreover, we have evaluated the system’s performance by computing the mean percentage error in the detection of the indoor position. Finally, we present a novel location prediction system based on neural embeddings, and a soft-attention mechanism, which is able to predict user’s next location with 67% accuracy

BLE-GSpeed: A new BLE- based dataset to estimate user gait speed

To estimate the user gait speed can be crucial in many topics, such as health care systems, since the presence of difficulties in walking is a core indicator of health and function in aging and disease. Methods for non-invasive and continuous assessment of the gait speed may be key to enable early detection of cognitive diseases such as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Wearable technologies can provide innovative solutions for healthcare problems. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology is excellent for wearables because it is very energy efficient, secure, and inexpensive. In this paper, the BLE-GSpeed database is presented. The dataset is composed of several BLE RSSI measurements obtained while users were walking at a constant speed along a corridor. Moreover, a set of experiments using a baseline algorithm to estimate the gait speed are also presented to provide baseline results to the research community