Indoor location based services challenges, requirements and usability of current solutions

Abstract

Indoor Location Based Services (LBS), such as indoor navigation and tracking, still have to deal with both technical and non-technical challenges. For this reason, they have not yet found a prominent position in people's everyday lives. Reliability and availability of indoor positioning technologies, the availability of up-to-date indoor maps, and privacy concerns associated with location data are some of the biggest challenges to their development. If these challenges were solved, or at least minimized, there would be more penetration into the user market. This paper studies the requirements of LBS applications, through a survey conducted by the authors, identifies the current challenges of indoor LBS, and reviews the available solutions that address the most important challenge, that of providing seamless indoor/outdoor positioning. The paper also looks at the potential of emerging solutions and the technologies that may help to handle this challenge.

Trading-off location accuracy and service quality: Privacy concerns and user profiles

“…Their aim is to provide protection that is sufficiently flexible to be adapted to the individual user's requirements, situations and transactions [12]; (3) Anonymity: the dissociation of user information, including location, from an individual's identity [13]; (4) Obfuscation: the process of degrading the quality of information about a person's location, with the aim of protecting user privacy [14,15]. Each of these approaches has its own challenges and limitations and so many applications use a combination to protect privacy [16].…”

An indoor navigation architecture using variable data sources for blind and visually impaired persons

“…There are several technologies and techniques used on positioning, and several ways of categorizing them, most of them reviewed recently [4]- [10]. Table I shows the characteristics of several signal properties used as positioning techniques.…”

“…Reference [4] compares several positioning technologies, and proposes a top three list of the most suitable positioning technology for each location based system (LBS) application segment. BVI users fit in the segments of Navigation, Location-Based Information Retrieval and Safety.…”

“…Different indoor LBS applications have different quality of service requirements and in [4] they are identified according to categories. An indoor LBS for BVI could be classified as belonging to three categories, Navigation and Tracking, Location-Based Information Retrieval and Safety and Security.…”

Making tourist guidance systems more intelligent, adaptive and personalised using crowd sourced movement data

“…Due to this issue, tracking data can be captured from several different sources such as Global navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers, e.g. GPS receivers embedded in mobile phones and In-Vehicle Navigation Devices, RFID tags and readers, video cameras and CCTVs, Bluetooth networks (Basiri et al 2015b(Basiri et al , 2017. Also large input data storage, retrieval and analysis could only be efficiently handled if the trajectories are stored in a graph database.…”