Indoor GPS Tracking: Coming Soon
30 Apr 2012Lots of us rely on GPS navigation technology for directions around unfamiliar towns and cities. And fleet managers, law enforcement, parents, pet owners, and many others rely on GPS tracker devices for monitoring and tracking pets, loved ones, children, criminals, and employees. But GPS tracking has largely been confined to outdoors, where global satellites can work.
But a new service could soon be giving you direction inside, as well as tracking your footsteps indoors. It’s referred to as IPS, or indoor positioning service, and you’ll soon be hearing more buzz about it.
IPS is a broad term used to describe the network of devices used to wireless locate people or objects inside a building.
The budding technology works off of a IPS chip. Broadcomm Inc, who is the biggest supplier to cell-phone manufacturers of Global Positioning System chips, manufactured and has begun shipping the new smart-phone GPS-tracking like microchip. The chip is designed to pinpoint a person’s location right down to within a few centimeters — including indoors.
Not only is the BCM4752 chip capable of tracking your horizontal position, but it can track your vertical position as well. In other words, it can tell what floor you are located in when inside a building.
For indoor tracking, the chip uses a myriad of sensor technology, including Wi-Fi (including 5G), Near Field Communication, Bluetooth, and radio. Additionally, magnetometers, step counters, altimeters, accelerometers, and gyroscopes are used to hone in on more precise location measurements. Broadcomm’s technology goes beyond Google’s 2D and Wi-Fi and Nokia’s 3D and Bluetooth uses.
Since Broadcomm has just released and begun shipping the chip, we can expect to see smart phones built with this technology within a year, experts say.
While knowing exactly where you are in an airport could be helpful, guided tours of parks, museums, and the like are potential uses of IPS. Still, marketers can likely envision the use of IPS in targeted advertisement.
The range of uses for indoor positioning systems extends only to innovators’ imaginations.
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