Today I read about the Dutch Telematica institute that has developed a location system based upon Bleutooth for indoor use. Immediately I had the idea that this could be implemented with CAT-iq as well.

Although this is more a B2B application I thought that this might generate some new ideas for the home environment.

 

 

Here is the information about the indoor localization concept of the Telematica institute  

For outdoor environments GPS (Global Positioning System) provides an effective solution to determine location of GPS enabled mobile devices. For indoor environments, however, such an effective solution does not exist whereas people spend 95% of their time inside buildings. BlueWhere ^TM mainly focuses on using Bluetooth for indoor localization.

 

Real Time indoor localization technologies are increasingly becoming affordable and portable. These systems aim at locating people and assets based on sensory data obtained from RFID, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. Indoor localization technologies have applications in different sectors such as military, healthcare, postal/courier, and recently retail and agricultural. Localization systems are expected s to become a $2.71 billion business in 2016 (Real Time Locating Systems 2008-2018, IDTechEx, July 2007).

 

Bluetooth is a pervasive technology nowadays as it has become a common feature of cellular phones. Mobile devices have found a mature market in large parts of the world. For example, in EU and USA there is almost one phone per person (Gartner report “Important Mobile and Wireless Market Directions, 2008 to 2012”, June 2008). In the Netherlands, 84-91% of people use a mobile phone regularly (Consumentenbehoeften mobiele communicatie, Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, February 2008). Bluetooth is present in 90% of the cell phones sold in Europe and the USA (the same Gartner report), and  67% of people are familiar with Bluetooth and more than half of them (i.e., 41% of the total) use Bluetooth to download music on the mobile phone (the same ministry report).

 

The Telematica Instituut has been a leading partner in several national and international research projects on context-aware applications. Within these projects, the use of Bluetooth as a context-source/sensor was a specific research item. The research results were used to develop a Bluetooth-based indoor positioning system for room level localization of (static) users. Technical characteristics and advantages of our system are:

• Reliance on response rate of Bluetooth inquiries,
• An infrastructure based architecture, and therefore no need for change, update or enhancement of mobile devices of users,
• No need for knowing the topology of the deployment area (i.e., the real world model) as being a fingerprint based method,
• No need for establishing Bluetooth connectivity between a target device and the infrastructure as designed for the Bluetooth discoverable mode of mobile devices.

 

The devised system is deployed and tested in our office building. It is an integral part of a context aware application called Colleague Radar ^TM  to locate employees in the building for their colleagues.

For more information please refer to our publications. 

 

Furthermore, the design and implementation of BlueWhere ^TM  has given us in-depth knowledge and expertise on Bluetooth technology and standard. This knowhow can be exploited in different problem areas like establishing connectivity, sensing, tracking and tracing, trust establishment, and security enhancement. Example application areas are:

• Crowd and queue detection,
• Statistical analysis of users mobility patterns (e.g., their paths, stops, pauses) in shops and venues,
• Prediction of user destinations, times of arrival, etc.