Positioning Smartphones


Navigation and Wayfinding, with optional Augmented Reality (AR)


Navigating to a colleague, room, or any other destination is the most common use case of indoor positioning with smartphones. Notably, the application is on the foreground (screen on). IndoorAtlas tech excels in these use cases because geomagnetic information and PDR are effectively used in addition to fusing radio information, geometric constraints etc.


Note that IndoorAtlas supports also AR Wayfinding and POIs.



Deployment information and requirements


Use cases and verticals

  • Healthcare : wayfinding for personnel and patients
  • Smart offices : finding rooms and colleagues
  • Transportation hubs: wayfinding in subway stations, airports, train stations
  • Museums : following a museum guide and getting location-based information
  • Logistic warehouses : finding products more efficiently for picking
  • Retail : wayfinding to products and shopping malls
  • Augmented Reality: show AR advertisements




Background Tracking


IndoorAtlas enables the use of smartphones for background tracking, which means carrying additional tracking devices or tags in many use cases is unnecessary. 


To save battery, the mobile operating systems (iOS, Android) have many restrictions by default in the background operation mode (screen off, phone e.g. in a trouser pocket). However, many of these can be turned off/bypassed by acquiring the necessary permissions from the user. IndoorAtlas example repositories for Android and iOS contain ready-to-run apps with the correct permissions.


IndoorAtlas SDKs contain two positioning modes:

  • Normal mode, which fuses all available sensor information for accurate tracking
  • Low power mode which uses radio information


Positioning accuracy of the normal mode in the background (screen off, phone e.g. in a trouser pocket) is on par with foreground. However, typically the required accuracy i the background use cases is low. Thus, it's often good to use Low Power mode in the background and normal mode in the foreground. This avoids using battery unnecessarily when high accuracy is not required. Note, however, that normal mode is more accurate also in the background than the low power mode.



Deployment information and requirements


Use cases and verticals

  • Hospitality: find a closest employee/staff member (e.g. staff member tracked in the background, the visitor only at request time)
  • Cleaning: geofencing used to track time spent in rooms
  • Healthcare : geofencing to detect patient or caregiver presence
  • Smart offices : space utilisation monitoring, wayfinding to the current location of a colleague
  • Logistic warehouses : analytics about time spent in tasks, e.g packing area



Positioning PCs and Embedded/IOT Devices


Asset tracking uses cases revolve around accessing the "last known position" of the assets to save operational costs. Note also that sometimes asset tracking is used in combination with navigation and wayfinding: finding an asset to be serviced becomes fast when the asset location is known and the maintenance field force gets wayfinding directions to the current asset location on their smartphone.



Deployment information and requirements


Use cases and verticals

  • ICT lifecycle management: finding the laptops to be serviced efficiently
  • Healthcare : tracking expensive medical equipment and finding them efficiently
  • Transportation : tracking asset locations, e.g. trolleys at airport
  • Logistic warehouses : tracking e.g. forklift locations