Indoor Place Prediction on Smart Phones

Abstract

High-accuracy and low-latency indoor place prediction for mobile users is crucial to enable applications for assisted living, emergency services, smart homes, and augmented reality. Previous studies on indoor place prediction use complex infrastructure with multiple visual/wireless anchors or multiple wireless access points. These localization techniques are difficult to deploy, may negatively impact user privacy through location tracking, and their data collection is not suitable for personalized place prediction. To solve these challenges, this paper proposes GoPlaces, a novel app that fuses inertial sensor data with WiFi-RTT estimated distances to predict the future indoor places visited by a user. GoPlaces does not require any infrastructure, except for one cheap off-the-shelf WiFi access point that supports ranging with RTT. In addition, it enables personalized place naming and prediction through its on-the-phone data collection and protects users' location privacy because user's data never leaves the phone. GoPlaces uses an attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory model to detect user's current trajectory, which is then used together with historical information stored in a prediction tree to infer user's future places. We implemented GoPlaces in Android and evaluated it in several indoor spaces. The experimental results demonstrate prediction accuracy as high as 92%, low latency, and low resource consumption on the phones.