Inexpensive User Driven Indoor Location Tracking
With the popularity of smartphones and location based services, a significant problem is that GPS does not work indoors, so mapping resolution becomes uselessly poor, right when it needs to be the highest.
The Inexpensive Bluetooth Based Indoor Positioning Hack works offline, and relies on coded beacon MAC addresses, which are used as location identifiers. This takes advantage of the information transferred during a part of the Bluetooth protocol (the discovery process), which makes an actual pairing or connection unnecessary. Therefore, the entire positioning process is performed locally on the user's phone, leaving all information in control of the user. This may be seen as a responsible (transparent and simple for the user to deactivate) implementation of location based services, best suited for custom small scale applications, such as tour guides, role playing games, or as an inexpensive behavioral research tool that Institutional Review Boards can be comfortable with.
This is the subject of a short paper in the Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) conference (see citation below) and has been used in studies regarding space usage and architectural design, with a goal of creating well informed models of building energy usage.
The Inexpensive Bluetooth Based Indoor Positioning Hack was a collaboration with Larry Rudolph, Albert Huang, Joe Branc, Stephen Intille, and Kent Larson. K.C. Cheung, S.S. Intille, and K. Larson, "An Inexpensive Bluetooth-Based Indoor Positioning Hack," in Proceedings of UbiComp 2006
Cheung, K. C. (2007). Understanding Behavior with Ubiquitous Computing for Architectural Design. Masters in Science Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cambridge, MA