About Seamless Positioning

Description Image

A digital tool for supporting on seamless positioning of people in outdoor and indoor environments.

Today, with the advent of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) global positioning in the earth’s surface is a successfully overcome problem. Nonetheless, local positioning in indoor environments is still a matter of active research, since GNSS signals get severely degraded in this kind of environments, and thus they cannot be used to track people with acceptable accuracy. The innovative idea behind Blue is to fuse the so-called signals of opportunity, which are transmitted for localization and non-localization purposes, but may be exploited to this end (WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, air pressure, light intensity, etc). Blue takes advantage of all these signals that are accessible from most smartphones to calculate their position and provide context-aware services on the palm of the people’s hands.

  • Seamless Positioning

  • Signals of Opportunity

  • Context-aware Services

Context-aware Services

Behavioral Analysis

You could determine how participants use a designed space by recording participant behaviors and/or tracking their movement within the space itself.

Contextual Information

You could get contextual information in different formats such as audio tracks or plain text, and in different ways such as screen notifications, mails or sms.

Real-time Positioning

You could follow the participants behaviors and/or tracking their movement within the space in real-time.

Suggestion Box

You could provide a suggestion box where context-based suggestions or complaints could be stored for further processing.

Zone Alarms

You could create, edit or delete zone alarms, check who enters and send notifications based on the activity.

Augmented Reality

You could use a built-in augmented reality engine to create a new world adding virtual objects to enhance the space.

How it works

The seamless positioning tool consists of three main elements:

  • A smartphone application which uses its sensors to collect the so called signals of opportunity (SoOP), it is in charge of computing its own position by fusing those SoOP according to a localization engine, and it allows the participants to set their profile, get contextual information, answer contextual questions, and send augmented reality suggestions.

  • The cloud which stores the participants’ profiles, positions, answers and suggestions, and shares resources between the app and the web services to achieve agility, reliability and elasticity.

  • The web services which get the information from the cloud allowing to visualize the participants’ suggestions, answers, real time positions, or the paths filtered by the participants profile characteristics among others.

Success Examples

GeoChild

GeoChild’s aims to create a cooperative and dynamic network of carers over which monitor the position of dependants, kids and elderly, carrying a low‐cost BLE wristband, giving them more freedom to safely roam within the city and on different means of transport, not only in open spaces such as parks or streets but also indoors such as bus/train stations, bus/trains carriages, city malls, etc.

CyberParks

Fostering knowledge about the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies and Public Spaces supported by strategies to improve their use and attractiveness.

ESPhIA

The main motivation of ESPhIA is based on the current need for a dynamic system for positioning which autonomously adapts to the availability of external signals depending on the environment. The positioning system developed in ESPhIA provides security services, protection, and rescue, regardless of the environment in which they are located.

WAY

WAY (Where Are You?) is a system which helps users to get their location and heading within buildings such as museums, airports or hospitals by using (a) the WiFi signals already deployed in those buildings, or (b) the inertial sensors of a foot-mounted IMU.

EthnoAlly

A digital research tool designed for coordinating those multiple acts of “serendipitous ethnography” that can be enacted today in many variable contexts with the help of smartphones. EthnoAlly consists of an application capable of collecting a variety of audio-visual, geolocative and textual materials. It also has an on-line platform on which such information can be stored, visualized, organized and analysed, making it the ideal partner and ‘ally’ of today’s ethnographer with immense possibilities for documentary filmmakers, journalists, artist and other professionals.

GIVARAIL

GIVARAIL born with the aim of investigating the merger of positioning technologies (GNSS and INS ) and artificial vision for a more secure, efficient and accurate automatic driving rail vehicles, which will result in increased profitability of rail integrated projects.

Contact Us

University of Deusto
  • Avda. Universidades 24
    Bilbao – Spain
  • Phone: +34 944 13 90 03 | ext: 2050