Indoor Location-Based Systems

People spend most of their time indoors, however indoor localisation and mapping have not been focused much so far. Some examples where indoor LBS are used or could be used to improve the quality of life are:

• Indoor telematics is the most popular LBS system, such as navigation.
• Presence sensing provides to the user which of his friends are in a close distance.

In detail, we can realise many use cases and environments where indoor localisation and mapping could facilitate our lives. Below, I gathered more use cases.

• Indoor Car-to-Car communication: Enables the exchange of warning messages (i.e. empty parking spots).

• Fleet management: Controls and coordinates entire fleets of robots indoors.
• Virtual Reality: Could be enhanced and merged with the real world, where the user’s location would become an essential aspect of the play.

• Hospitals: Could locate their equipment, provide navigation to their visitors and monitor the exercise and location of their patients.

• Equipment Monitoring: Provides tools for identifying and report broken equipment (i.e.: burned-out luminaries).

• Internet of Things: Taking decisions based on the location of user equipment. (i.e. switch on or off the lights when the user is present or absent).

• Fire Fighter Assistance: Provides navigation to fire fighters through safe zones or even localize people in danger indoors.

• Surveillance: Enables parents to localize their children, pet owners to find their animals or police to track convicts or terrorists.

• Building Evacuation: Enables users to conduct multi-agent indoor evacuation simulations.

Moreover, recommender mechanisms can benefit from Indoor-LBS by providing the mobile user with nearby points of interest (i.e. restaurants etc.). Furthermore, marketing can be improved by providing the consumer with information about products and services of local relevance or by the identification of more. Finally, analytics can benefit shop owners, since they can find products which are visited the most or least and make firefightersreportingatbetter use of their space or even get benefit by trading this information.