Low-Cost Indoor Human Tracking by Utilizing Fluctuation of Received Radio Signal Strength

Existing indoor positioning technologies aim at providing location information of extremely high accuracy, but are limited by the requirement for infrastructure with high installation and maintenance costs. Thus, for indoor human tracking applications, a suitable indoor positioning technique should be selected by taking into account practical considerations of adequate accuracy as well as cost-effectiveness. Based on this observation, an indoor, room-level tracking method is presented, which is characterized by an infrastructure that is cost-effective to build and maintain with no need to deal with calibration issues of the fingerprint map caused by hardware heterogeneity. A mobile device tracks variations in the radio signal strength from nearby Bluetooth beacons to determine the entry and exit of the user’s device from a given room or hallway. Therefore, by determining the sequence of users’ movements, their moving path can be recorded for indoor tracking or navigation. Experiments revealed that the proposed method attains an average hit rate, false alarm rate, and miss rate of 94.2%, 3.6%, and 5.8%, respectively.