Indoor Location

GPS needs a clear sky view to work. Every child knows that. Our navigation systems, particularly smartphones, with all these location - enabled apps do not work indoors. And while we know it, it has still been a disappointment to most. I am not even talking about Google maps guiding me through a shopping mall. I talk about even simpler things like being unable to "check in" at a conference room, a cinema or a concert hall. Or take an indoor geotagged snapshot with a GPS - equipped camera.

Despite the issue being quite important, Ithought the solution had been very far away. Because there is no unified and agreed standard to equip all the buildings worldwide with some technology helping the devices calculate their position. So it was a surprise to me when at the Mobile World Congress last month I found two solutions that promise to solve the indoor location problem now.

The first one was jointly presented by SiRF, CSR and ST. I mentioned Sirf here back in 2006 when it was the king of the hill with the SRF Star III GPS chipset that found it's way into most personal navigation devices back then.  A few years later SiRF having trouble to launch the Star's III successor was acquired by CSR. And now both companies partner with ST, one of the biggest MEMS vendor to deliver a combined solution aiming to solve the indoor location problem. What they do has two parts in it: the clever and the smart.

The clever part combines a GPS receiver with multi-axis accelerometer and WiFi sniffer. They take the last known GPS location and continue with dead reckoning based on WiFi echo and accelerometer readouts, calculating the path the device has taken since it lost the GPS signal. See: this does not involve any extra infrastructure setup. You just walk into a building and first, the chipset knows you are in and then it tries to extrapolate where exactly in you are.

The smart part is even better. They handle all the computations on board their own chipset and it continues to feed the location data to the upper level OS and applications as if it was still receiving the GPS signal. Therefore any application will continue to work. You just need a new handset with the CSR/SiRF chip inside. I like this smart part a lot!

The second solution I came across was the Fraunhofer awiloc library. This does not have as generic impact as the CSR/SiRF, but can be very helpful in a number of applications. It does not require any hardware, works on you existing Android handset by only monitoring the WiFi echo. Developers can just take the library Fraunhofer provides and build it into their applications. The awiloc requires training the device. Meaning you have to walk through the building first and let the device capture the echo and then map it on the floor plan. So you may find it a bit limited, but it is fantastic for many scenarios, like museums or even smarthomes where your handset is expected to be contextually aware. Like when you are in the living room your top-most menu are the living room light scenes and TV control and when you are in the bedroom, it automatically reconfigures itself to control the bedroom music source.

The two above mentioned solutions solving the indoor location problem are good harbingers. The indoor location is coming, as we all want it to come. It is good to see we will have it sooner than expected.