Towards fully organic indoor positioning

Abstract

Indoor positioning systems based on fingerprinting techniques generally require costly initialization and maintenance by trained surveyors. Organic positioning systems aim to eliminate these deficiencies by managing their own accuracy and obtaining input from users and other sources. Such systems introduce new challenges, e.g., detection and filtering of erroneous user input, estimation of the positioning accuracy, and means of obtaining user input when necessary. We envision a fully organic indoor positioning system, where all available sources of information are exploited in order to provide room-level accuracy with no active intervention of users. For example, such systems can exploit pre-installed cameras to associate a user's location with a Wi-Fi fingerprint from the user's phone; and it can use a calendar to determine whether a user is in the room reported by the positioning system. Numerous possibilities for integration exist that may provide better indoor positioning.