Infrastructure free indoor positioning system

Abstract

Latest technological advancement uncovered new social and entrepreneurial opportunities in fields like civil engineering and facility management. While most outdoor location challenges have been addressed in the past few years, with declassified military technologies such as Motion Imagery Standards Board and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Digital Motion Imagery Standard being integrated into solutions that enhance real-time emulation of surveillance video streams over digital maps, there is plenty of room for innovation when indoor location is considered. The market associated to indoor positioning is expected to significantly grow in the following decade since people spend more and more time indoors and promising advantages of such technologies have been identified in healthcare, retail, logistics and leisure. Yet, conventional indoor positioning systems mostly rely on costly and difficult to maintain infrastructure. Discordantly, the hereby paper is introducing an infrastructure free indoor positioning web application designed for routing people inside facilities and building evacuation scenarios. The proposed architecture is independent on external hardware or beacons, relying on a generic sensors framework that exposes the underlying capabilities of a mobile phone for data collection and internet connection for assessing current location and providing guidance in respect with an already known topography. Therefore, this design might be easily extended to various facilities, individualizing through no initial costs for sensors deployment and light resource consumption for the user, since data is not processed on a native application. Such flexibility is considered to optimize the navigation inside large public places and reduce the time required to find products, people or shops, offering the users more time for what matters.