Indoor Localization: Challenges and Opportunities

Accurate indoor positioning can transform the retail, travel and transportation, and sports industries. For example, think of getting a mobile coupon for a shirt when you are standing near to it in a clothing store and turn-by-turn indoor navigation to the food booth with the shortest queue in airports and stadiums. While the Indoor Location market includes many new business opportunities (estimated around $4.5B by 2019), this emerging area suffers from shortcomings such as limited accuracy, complex maintenance of indoor sensing platforms and lack of data quality assessment tools. This talk will review existing indoor positioning technologies and will discuss their aforementioned limitations. We will present new directions for mitigating these limitations, and we will focus on novel data smoothing algorithms for cleansing noisy indoor data. These algorithms open market opportunities supporting new indoor use cases such detection of common customer paths, targeted/wanderer customers and queues length. Finally, we will discuss future trends in indoor localization and how these technologies will be able to pin point you to a small grocery product in a large supermarket.