New Indoor Location Technologies Emerge as Retailers’ Interest in Tracking Soars

For retailers, customer location is quickly becoming a top priority
for brick and mortar shopping venues.

As reported by Inside GNSS: New technologies are emerging to fill the gap left by GNSS services whose signals cannot penetrate indoor spaces. Using everything from triangulation and flickering light bulbs to the Earth’s magnetic field, start-up companies are lining up to help brick-and-mortar retailers beat back their online competition with location-inspired service.

Retailers “are trying to turn their stores into showrooms” and use location-based data to connect with and influence customers who might otherwise peruse their shelves then go order the products online, said Dan Ryan, co-founder and CEO of location start-up ByteLight. “[Retailers] have identified [customer] location as a top priority.”

ByteLight uses light based communication between the store
and handheld devices so that the customer can find what they
are looking for - and the most direct way there.

“I think people want to be treated as clients as opposed to customers,” said John Fisher, co-founder of the Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based company DMTI Spatial, which provides “enterprise location intelligence solutions.”

Consumers want stores to offer goods and services tailored to them, Fisher said. The more firms can use information “to provide better and more pointed service to individuals, the better we can achieve that.”

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based ByteLight offers software that modulates LED lights, turning them into information beacons. It licenses the software to LED manufactures and sells a software platform that can be integrated into any mobile app to provide real-time location data accurate to within a meter.

“The software basically modulates the LED light,” explained Ryan. “It will actually interact with the LED and the light will be flickering on and off so fast that your eye cannot see — but in a way that we can detect using by the camera in any smart phone.”

The technology’s meter–level accuracy is the “Holy Grail” for indoor location, said Ryan.

WiFiSlam uses a combination of WiFi and GPS to help
derive customer location; with a high level of accuracy.

“At that level of accuracy you are going to enable a whole new ecosystem of apps and, particularly in retail, you’re going to enable CPGs (consumer product goods) and brands to reach directly to consumers,” Ryan told Inside GNSS. “The first phase of location was focused on the retailers themselves. The next phase of location is going to be focused on brands and CPGs.”

It’s not just small firms that are scrambling for a place in the retail location market. Apple underscored its interest in the space with the purchase earlier this year of WiFiSlam in a deal reportedly valued at $20 million. According to thenextweb.com WiFiSlam uses a combination of WiFi and GPS signals to derive location information and develop more accurate maps — particularly indoor maps.

Apple is also offering iBeacons on the latest versions of the iPhone. Reports suggest the technology enables beacons, placed anywhere inside a retail space, for example, to transmit information to an iBeacon-equipped iPhone using Bluetooth low energy (BLE) communications technology. The advantage for Apple, beside the fact that a great many phones have Bluetooth, is that many of the iPhones sold over the last two years reportedly need only a software upgrade to become iBeacon capable.

Perhaps the firm with the most ambitious plans, however, is Finland-based IndoorAtlas. The company released its first app at Advertising Week in September in New York. The software uses the distortions in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by the steel in a structure to pinpoint a smart phone user inside the structure.

IndoorAtlas can locate someone with the app to within a meter, said Wibe Wagemans, the firm’s U.S representative. “With WiFi, for example if you are in a lab situation you might get WiFi accuracy down to maybe 7 to 12 meters — in perfect conditions and that would require what they call WiFi triangulation. That would not work with the WiFi that is inside buildings today. You would need to install completely new hardware. For large buildings those installations will cost way over $100,000 per building.”

IndoorAtlas has its own challenges, however, specifically that retailers need to map their store’s geomagnetic field in order to use the app to locate customers.

IndoorAtlas uses crowdsourced geomagnetic 'profiles' to update
changing maps of indoor environments. 

“Right now we do need the floor plans and the magnetic maps. But the partners that we have spoken to say, for them, it is not a big hurdle at all,” said Wagemans. “We are speaking to retailers with a few thousand stores and they say that the cost to magnetically map all the thousands of stores is insignificant compared to all the other solutions out there, including Bluetooth and WiFi.”

Wagemans suggested, however, that having building maps might not always be an issue. He said IndoorAtlas could use indirect crowd sourcing or SLAMing (simultaneous localization and mapping) to trace the layout of unmapped buildings fairly quickly.

You have the application running in the background, explained Wagemans, where it “kind of sniffs out where you are.” You derive a map of the building as you go based on the data gathered along the way. If you can combine data from a number of users through the cloud — the technique used by the Waze app to track traffic conditions and map roads — you can develop maps of buildings all over the world fairly quickly, he asserted.

“A retailer would say ‘Hey, my app has millions of users,’” said Wagemans, “And while these users are roaming my store, I know where they are going. I can grab their magnetic field data — if I get their permission, their opt-in — and as a result I can build maps and floor plans. And, even [if things get moved around], the magnetic maps will automatically be updated because I have people in the store and I get the latest real-time information.’”

You could take this approach global if you could incorporate the IndoorAtlas app into the work of a mapping firm that is constantly developing new maps, said Wagemans, “you would have most of the buildings in the world covered” in fairly short order.  

When asked if IndoorAtlas was currently working with a mapping company in this way, Wagemans said he could not disclose that.

“We are talking to players in several verticals but I cannot disclose any names,” he said, adding, “Eventually our goal is to become the GPS of indoors.”

A Plan to Turn Every Lightbulb Into an Ultra-Fast Alternative to Wi-Fi

As reported by Quartz: Current wireless networks have a problem: The more popular they become, the slower they are. Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have just become the latest to demonstrate a technology that transmits data as light instead of radio waves, which gets around the congestion issue and could be ten times faster than traditional Wi-Fi.

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In dense urban areas, the range within which Wi-Fi signals are transmitted is increasingly crowded with noise—mostly, other Wi-Fi signals. What’s more, the physics of electromagnetic waves sets an upper limit to the bandwidth of traditional Wi-Fi. The short version: you can only transmit so much data at a given frequency. The lower the frequency of the wave, the less it can transmit.

But what if you could transmit data using waves of much higher frequencies, and without needing a spectrum license from your country’s telecoms regulator? Light, like radio, is an electromagnetic wave, but it has about 100,000 times the frequency of a Wi-Fi signal, and nobody needs a license to make a light bulb. All you need is a way to make its brightness flicker very rapidly and accurately so it can carry a signal.

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The idea sounds daft: Who would want to sit under a flickering bulb? But Li-Fi, a standard proposed just two years ago, is seeing rapid technological progress.

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First, data are transmitted to an LED light bulb—it could be the one illuminating the room in which you’re sitting now. Then the light bulb is flicked on and off very quickly, up to billions of times per second. That flicker is so fast that the human eye cannot perceive it. (For comparison, the average energy-saving compact fluorescent bulb already flickers between 10,000 and 40,000 times per second.) Then a receiver on a computer or mobile device—basically, a little camera that can see visible light—decodes that flickering into data. LED bulbs can be flicked on and off quickly enough to transmit data around ten times as fast the fastest Wi-Fi networks. (If they could be manipulated faster, the bandwidth would be even higher.)

Li-Fi’s limitations are similar to next-generation Wi-Fi

Li-Fi has one big drawback compared to Wi-Fi: you, or rather your device, need to be within sight of the bulb. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be a special bulb; in principle, overhead lights at work or at home could be wired to the internet. But it would mean that, unlike with Wi-Fi, you couldn’t go into the next room unless there were wired bulbs there too.

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However, a new generation of ultrafast Wi-Fi devices that we’re likely to start using soon face a similar limitation. They use a higher range of radio frequencies, which aren’t as crowded with other signals (at least for now), and have a higher bandwidth, but, like visible light, cannot penetrate walls.

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Engineers and a handful of startups, like Oledcomm, have been experimenting with Li-Fi technology. The Fudan University team unveiled an experimental Li-Fi network in which four PCs were all connected to the same light bulb. Other researchers are working on transmitting data via different colors of LED lights—imagine, for example, transmitting different signals through each of the the red, green and blue LEDs inside a multi-colored LED light bulb.

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Because of its limitations, Li-Fi won’t do away with other wireless networks. But it could supplement them in congested areas, and replace them in places where radio signals need to be kept to a minimum, like hospitals, or where they don’t work, such as underwater.

More Mobile Phones Mean Fewer World-Wide Deaths from Natural Disasters

As reported by Quartz: Fewer people were killed or affected by natural disasters than in any other year in the past decade, according to a report (pdf) released Oct. 17. In 2012, some 15,706 died, compared to 37,907 in 2011 or almost 304,474 casualties in 2010, according to the International Federation of Red Cross, IFRC, and Red Crescent Societies.

The smaller death toll is in part because last year didn't see brutal disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 230,000 dead in South and Southeast Asia, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, each of which killed over 100,000. But we can also thank cell phones for last year’s smaller disaster-related death toll, according to the IFRC report.

In the Philippines, for example, which is struck by about 20 typhoons a year and whose population is scattered over thousands of archipelagos, mobile phones have been especially helpful. (Today, the number of cell phone subscriptions outnumber people.) The country has set up a surveillance system to send disaster damage reports and other data to emergency health officials via text messages. Before Typhoon Bopha—a category 5 super typhoon with winds of 280 km/h (175 mph) landed last year, authorities were able to evacuate some 41,000 citizens as well as quickly rescue people after the storm struck, thanks to cell phones and other communication technology. Even though Bopha was the most powerful storm the country had experienced up to that point, its death toll is behind that of eight other storms that hit before 2012. So far this year, 11 people have been killed during the worst typhoon of the year.

The idea of “humanitarian technology” has been picking up steam over the past few years. There are 6.8 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world. And if proper planning is in place cell phones in particular could be one of the most effective means for authorities and rescue staff to communicate with the public during emergencies and natural disasters. (One caveat is that after disasters hit, communication infrastructure, including cell phone towers, is often knocked out of service.) Earlier this month, mobile phones helped relief workers in India coordinate one of the country’s largest evacuation efforts ever and helped citizens dodge the worst of Cyclone Phailin.

There’s room for more use of mobile phones in rural areas where people traditionally get their news from their neighbors and relatives. As more people in rural regions as well as in developing countries subscribe to cheap cell plans, they can get disaster and safety information directly and quickly. Moreover, locals—in both rural and urban areas—are usually responsible for the bulk of the rescue efforts during the first critical hours after a natural disaster. These de facto first responders would be further helped with phones that help them reach or consult with health workers and aid agencies.

Smartphones, GPS Part of Scientist's Smoking Cessation Research

As reported by EurekaAlert: We use them to text, tweet, post and, sometimes, make a call. Now, smartphones are helping with public health research.

A recently published smoking cessation study conducted by a researcher affiliated with the University of Houston includes a technique called "geo-mapping," which makes use of GPS technology to pinpoint a study participant's location and the location of tobacco retail outlets nearby.

The study was published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research.

"We're examining the possible mechanisms underlying the relationship between being close to a tobacco retail outlet and not being able to successfully quit smoking," said Lorraine Reitzel, associate professor of health in the UH College of Education. "We think it's because tobacco retail outlets might cue a greater urge to smoke within the person attempting to quit, maybe because of product advertising, a learned association between the retail outlet and purchasing cigarettes, or simply the greater availability and access to cigarettes that a close retail outlet provides."

Reitzel is part of a growing health department at the college. Recruited from MD Anderson Cancer Center, her research focuses on understanding individual and environmental influences that lead to health risk behaviors. She's interested in developing tobacco dependence interventions for low socio-economic areas and groups.

"I'm interested in better understanding whatever is preventing these smokers from successfully quitting, and then learning how to tailor treatments or public policy to help them," she said.
Participants carried a smart phone to collect data about their real-time, in-the-moment experiences throughout their daily travels during the quitting process. The study examined data collected from them before quitting through one week after their "quit day."

"When people were answering questions about their urge to smoke, we knew where they were," she said. "We used that information to better understand what the tobacco retailer outlet environment was like around them at the same moment they were describing their urge."

The smartphone research suggested that it wasn't the number of locations to purchase cigarettes that increased the urge to smoke, but the proximity of the closest tobacco retail outlet to the participant's home. When people responded from home, those living closer to tobacco retail outlets reported greater urges to smoke than those living farther from outlets.

"From a policy perspective, this suggests that if we are going to help people quit smoking, especially those in lower income areas, which tend to have a higher prevalence of tobacco stores, we need to think about disallowing the sale of tobacco products in close proximity to residential areas to make it more difficult to get tobacco when the urge to smoke strikes," Reitzel said. "If people can't access cigarettes within three to five minutes, the urge to smoke usually passes."

Reitzel's research was funded by the UT Health Science Center School of Public Health, the American Cancer Society and MD Anderson Cancer Center, among others.

"Many people try to quit smoking upwards of eight, nine, 10 times before they're successful," she said. "For the rest of their lives they have to be vigilant and fight to stay tobacco-free."

E911 Location Technology may not be Accurate Enough for All Emergencies

As reported by GCN: There is a great deal of interest in tracking the location of mobile devices. Commercial carriers use location information to deliver services such as targeted advertising. The public safety community needs it to pinpoint 911 calls from mobile phones and to track personnel in the field.

The challenge is making wireless location technology accurate enough for use in life-and-death situations.

Polaris Wireless, which provides higher accuracy wireless location data for 911 call centers using its RF pattern-matching technology, is experimenting with the feasibility of using commercial GPS-only services for some public safety applications. It is “good enough” for some uses, not for others.

We often assume that the Global Positioning System that provides location data for many smartphones and navigation applications is very accurate. But GPS [for smartphones] has limitations when not assisted by other technologies, although they often are not noticed by users.

Government standards call for accuracy of at least 7.8 meters at a 95 percent confidence level. That’s about 26 feet, which is not bad. But atmospheric conditions, the local environment and the quality of the receiver can change that dramatically.

The Federal Aviation Administration has found that some receivers can locate a user to within three meters, horizontally. But for vertical information — determining what floor someone is on inside a building — forget about it. Likewise, if there are buildings, trees, mountains or other obstructions in the way — anywhere except in a flat, open-sky environment — GPS accuracy can quickly drop to the tens of meters.

Accuracy to within 50 meters is useful for some things, but for it’s not good enough for public safety. There are a number of technologies to improve accuracy, such as Polaris’s OmniLocate RF pattern-matching service, but although they show “significant promise,” they are not yet dependable enough for first responders answering 911 calls, according to a Federal Communications Commission study.

The FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council conducted tests late last year in the San Francisco Bay area to establish a baseline of current capabilities of three commercial location technologies.

“Even the best location technologies tested have not proven the ability to consistently identify the specific building and floor, which represents the required performance to meet public safety's needs,” the report said. “This is not likely to change over the next 12 to 24 months.”

Companies See Market for Systems To Counter GPS Jamming Devices

UAV RF communications testing in an anechoic chamber.

As reported by Space News: The proliferation of GPS jamming devices is creating a market for countermeasures, both in the defense and commercial sectors, industry officials say.

Companies are testing and rolling out new systems to counter the threat, either by overcoming jamming signals or by identifying and locating their source, they say.

In a speech at the annual Air Force Association conference on Sept. 17, Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, which operates the 30-plus satellite GPS constellation, highlighted jamming as an increasingly common problem.

“Lots of jammers [are] out there for GPS,” Shelton said. “In fact, you can buy a jammer on the Internet. By the way, that’s illegal, but you can find them on the Internet and lots of adversaries around the world have GPS jamming capability so we’re going to have to learn to fight through GPS jamming.”

Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver, prime contractor for the next-generation GPS 3 satellite system, has said that the new satellites will have eight times the jamming resistance of their predecessors. The GPS 3 satellites are slated to begin launching in 2015 but it will be several more years before that system is fully deployed.

In the interim, companies are seeing growing demand for systems that counter jamming threats to both military and civil GPS signals.

“We've seen enough of it [that] we think there’s a market,” said Kevin Farrell, general manager of positioning, navigation and timing at Exelis Geospatial Systems of Rochester, N.Y.

A fairly common Chinese made GPS jamming device that
can be found on the Internet.  Purchasing or operating one in the
USA is illegal.  In the EU using one is illegal, but they can still be
purchased.

Exelis has been testing a product called the Signal Sentry 1000 that detects and locates GPS interference sources and allows users to notify law enforcement. 

As an example of the proliferation of commercially available GPS jamming devices and the problems they pose, Exelis officials have regularly cited so-called personal privacy GPS jammers, which are commonly used by truckers so employers will not know where they are. If enough trucks equipped with these devices were parked at an active shipping port, they could wreak havoc on signals used by maritime traffic. 

Exelis officials said interest in the Signal Sentry 1000 has been particularly strong among airports and law enforcement agencies. The company is in active discussion on two possible sales of the system, they say.

Joe Rolli, Exelis’ program manager for Signal Sentry, said the technology used in the program could eventually lead to military applications.

Raytheon Co. of Waltham, Mass., is also working on a new product for its GPS anti-jam line called MiniGAS. Executives are touting it as the company’s lightest and smallest GPS anti-jamming system that helps overcome interference. On Sept. 11, the company announced its first contract for demonstrator units of the new system but did not name the customer.

The Defense Department, meanwhile, has been working on improved antenna solutions that would withstand jamming. In July, the Navy conducted a test in which it mounted a small antenna system on a unmanned aerial vehicle and subjected it to heavy interference. While there was no formal report on the outcome, Mark Burroughs,  navigation lead for the communication and GPS navigation program office at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., described the results as “very good.”

While many anti-jam units are about the size of a Frisbee, this system was about the size of a hockey puck, Burroughs said. The smaller size would allow the Defense Department to add another layer of protection, particularly on smaller vehicles.

The Navy plans to evaluate a series of anti-jam options, Burroughs said.

Experts and industry officials said one of the problems facing the military is accurately attributing the jamming to an adversary.  While new technology may be able to pinpoint exactly where jamming is coming from, it creates questions about whether individuals or groups are acting alone or on behalf of an adversary.

This can be an important distinction given what Shelton had to say about options for countering GPS jamming threats.

“Certainly tactics, techniques and procedures can help. Antenna designs will help as well,” he said. “But let me tell you also that big jammers are called targets. As they radiate and perform their operations, we can identify, geolocate and destroy those targets in a campaign.”

GPS, Rear-View Camera in Motorcycle Helmet

GPS, digital audio, and hands-free phone systems have become
common in cars, but motorcycles have largely been left behind.
Now, Skully integrates these feature and more in a new motorcycle
helmet.

As reported by CNet: Using GPS on a motorcycle usually involves looking down at a portable navigation device on the handlebars, but Skully Helmets wants to update that experience. The company developed the Skully P1 motorcycle helmet, which gives riders a heads-up display and integrates not only GPS, but a rear-view camera, hands-free phone system, and voice command.

According to Skully's press materials, the display is not in the rider's primary field of vision, and appears as if it were floating 6 meters ahead.

The helmet runs a modified version of the Android operating system, which comes loaded with navigation and Bluetooth connectivity. With the helmet paired to a smartphone through Bluetooth, the rider can use voice command to make phone calls and start music playback.

A heads-up display shows the rider turn-by-turn directions or the image
from a rear-view camera.

The heads-up display can also show the image from an integrated rear-view camera. Skully notes that this camera has a 180 degree field of vision, so the rider can also see when it is safe to change lanes.

Skully will show off the P1 helmet this week at the Demo 2013 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The company did not say when the helmet would become available, or list a retail price.