Future Technologies

Indoor positioning and more info on Nokia Locate Sensor

By Mike on 19 January 2009

GLOBAL – Nokia Locate Sensor sparked a surge of worldwide interest, and indoor positioning obviously plays a vital role in the development of this hot concept.

Since we brought you word of the Nokia Research Center refreshing its website and more clearly connecting the dots between Nokia concepts and real-life products and services last week, NRC has released an interesting new paper on Location, Context and mobile services. Granted it’s not super in-depth, nonetheless it does touch on some interesting aspects of NRC’s plans in this crucial area of development, including a few much talked about projects including Nokia Point&Find, but also mentions lesser known developments such as the Nokoscope project (which we’ll talk about in a separate post this week), and also offers more information on NRC’s approach to indoor positioning, indirectly yet pertinently referring to Nokia Locate Sensor and the technology behind it.

In the newly published paper from NRC, it openly addresses what it refers to as the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of GPS technologies:

“They don’t work well in the structures in which we find ourselves every day, such as offices, shopping malls, hospitals, and schools. Studies have found that 80 percent of our time is spent indoors. Being able to find friends or relatives in a sports stadium, for example, can save time and ease frustrations. For critical services such as law enforcement, fire departments, emergency personnel, or simply ordinary businesses, effectiveness often involves knowing immediately where people and resources are inside buildings and other complexes.”

Leading on from this it mentions the alternative technologies and solutions that are being pursued to improve indoor positioning:

“Nokia is working on ways to provide accurate indoor positioning using readily available infrastructures such as Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile clients. Our work with standards bodies to create open APIs will enable much more rapid rollout of these compelling services without the high cost and effort of current systems.”

In a very short section of the paper entitled ‘Where are my keys?’ it touches on the Nokia Locate Sensor concept, and mentions low power RFID tags as one of the key ingredients in locating tagged everyday objects such as your keys or glasses.

“Local positioning technology developed by Nokia makes mobile phones aware of the direction of and distance to nearby wireless-enabled devices—including lowpower RFID tags attached to eyeglasses, keys, and other easily misplaced objects. With GPS, any spot on earth can be found. Soon our misplaced keys may be, too, thanks to ubiquitous miniaturized receivers and compact direction-finding antennas in our mobile phones.”

What are your thoughts on indoor positioning. Is it as important as outdoor GPS-based positioning, and do you think a rock-solid solution would improve your mobile life? Scribble down your thoughts below.

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Farhan Says:
January 20th, 2009 at 6:22 am

Mike Thanks for directing me to NokoScope , I’ve written a small review of the same based on available information at

http://senseapplied.com/index.php/nokoscope-by-nokia/

Regards

Farhan

Paul Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 2:45 pm

Hi – I have done a fair amount of research into indoor LBS and have spent the past 2 years developing an indoor LBS app which runs on mobile phones. This is just a hobby for me so progress is slow and I have worked alone up till now.

I REALLY think that indoor LBS and personal navigation is the thing of the future and will be very big once all the technological challenges have been overcome – and they WILL be overcome.

When I started my research no one appeared to be working on the topic. Now it seems they are catching up. I must admit though to being dissapointed with the app which Nokia are trialing at Kamppi. The graphics are impossible to read and the navigation, in my opinion, could be improved (onscreen navigation not map navigation).

I have tried to make my app operate on the mobile without any external connection but when I add advertising options the drain on mobile cpu becomes expensive so am switching to a mobi-based app.

I have also added a routefinder code to the app but this brings on board challenges related to map orientation relative to the surrounding mall. These challenges of course are not there if WiFi automatic location is used as I am sure this can automatically orient the on-screen image correctly.

Its great to have automatic location identification using WiFi but this can be expensive in some cases. Also it means that the app can only be installed in buildings having sufficient WiFi coverage.

I would like to add WiFi location sensing to my app but do not have the resources nor the know-how. So I use a kind of simple manual location identification. The beauty of this is that my app could be built and installed in any building since there is no need to install or have WiFi.

I am currently experiementing with adding landmark identification to the routefinder code as my research shows that for indoor wayfinding people rely on the identification of landmarks within the building.

I still have many challenges to face and overcome but I know I will get there. In the meantime I am enjoying the journey.

Paul

Anders Isvén Reply:
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:48 am

I would like to know if these LBS systems can be used to position vehicles in subway tunnels or in mines?

Paul Reply:
September 18th, 2009 at 11:03 am

Thanks for your comment.

The way the system works;

Firstly there is no automatic detection of indoor location in the manner of outdoor gps location. There are various reasons for this;

gps doesnt work indoors

research is underway worldwide in using Wi Fi, Bluetooth and other systems for automatic indoor location detection but theres still work to be done here.

Some companies (Nokia for example) are experimenting with a system using Wi Fi indoors.

I have chosen not to use this technology – mainly due to not having the expertise but also as I want my app to work in any indoor environment withouit the need for an onboard Wi Fi system.

So my app has a map onboard and the user finds his current location by simply standing next to a given marker and entering the marker id. the app then knows where on the map the marker is and places the user there.

So I dont think its what you are looking for but feel free to ask if you have other issues.