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Indoor location or indoor positioning. What really counts is inner beauty? When people spend between 80 and 90% of their time indoors, one can not deny the importance that the indoor location has. Its measurement becomes more relevant and natural than at the beginning it wants to appear.
Indoor vs outdoor positioning
The role of positioning systems has become increasingly clear in people’s lives, with integration in the technologies used in daily life and with the perceived advantages.
Nowadays almost all people have a device equipped with positioning features, be it a common smartphone, a tablet, a GPS or a smartwatch.
It was the GPS (Global Positioning System) that revolutionized outdoor positioning when it became available to the public in the late 1990s.
Given the impossibility of using GPS in the interior, however, other technological patterns have emerged, and the positioning technology has begun to turn more indoors, with new possibilities emerging in the internal use. Mobile computing has become a top priority for technology developers.
The indoor positioning raises more complexities than the outdoor positioning, through GPS, since a certain infrastructure needs to be placed in the interior. But this inner positioning also raises many possibilities.
Uses of internal positioning systems
Nowadays, the positioning systems act in different stages, from the comfort of the house to the workplace, from the entertainment in the cinema room to the hospital, from the museum to the shopping mall – places where visitors are guided in territories still unknown.
In a gym, it is also possible to direct the training of the person and to show the results of the efforts made. In a big event, where several activities take place simultaneously in different spaces, the visitor can be guided to the activity that he most desires at that moment.
Some other examples of internal location applications are:
- Augmented reality
- Indoor robotics
- Parking lots
- Accessibility aids for the blind
- Hypermarkets and shops
- Warehouses
- Airports, bus or metro stations
- Hotels
- Maps of buildings
Advantages of using indoor location tracking
The applications can provide useful information, showing interesting results to the user.
Indoor location solutions are very much targeted for health care, in hospitals, and in nursing homes.
These devices can also be used to prevent theft. For companies, these technologies can be used to improve the use of resources (objects and people) in order to reduce costs.
Indoor location tracking technologies
Indoor location relies heavily on Wi-Fi Fingerprinting, the information received by Wi-Fi devices, as Wi-Fi networks are currently in many places.
The Bluetooth beacon is another example of easy-to-use technology in indoor spaces.
The CCG, which has won awards in international indoor location competitions, is working on providing real-time location information for people or resources with LSE – Location, and Sensing Engine technology.
This sensing and localization engine allows rapid integration with existing information systems.
