Displacement Sensing and Bluetooth LE

Kwang, Soo Hau (2015) Displacement Sensing and Bluetooth LE. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Geolocation is not new at all, it is as old as life on earth, and it is about knowing where you are. There are 4 known geolocation techniques. The first oldest way is actually just reference to known locations, and it is the most ancient geolocation technique used, to draw this into picture: “I’m left of the big mountain or south of the yellow river”, reference to something that you really know. Next we have Time-Keeping technique, a way that early mariners used to plot longitude and to measure how far east or west that they have actually gone (from port) and soon it became the driving force behind the development of first mechanical clock by John Harrison and origins of the Green Meridian Time (GMT) for longitude (international time zone). A close cousin of time-keeping technique is actually the Dead-Reckoning system, it is a way of inferring your position based on last known coordinates and plotting along the bearing and speed, and estimating where you would be at a particular time. Dead-Reckoning system is commonly used in the submarine navigation and also in some GPS equipment in cars. Follow by Triangulation method, the most commonly geolocation technique used today, it infers your location based on your relative distance estimated from signal strengths from a number of beacons, and these beacons could be in space (satellites) or on the ground as a form of 3G or Wi-Fi cell towers. Finally the future of geolocation, I think, is something that uses reference known location plus displacement information to measure how far and what kind of movement somewhat in 3 dimensional axis, and to estimate where would you be based on the movements. And this is where the FYP research title kicks in, by leveraging the accelerometer sensors and Bluetooth embedded in smartphone and to craft an algorithm to calculate distance and direction movement from initial known position. The goal is to put this technique into working solutions as below: 1) Indoor Navigation System 2) Indoor Pathway Mapping (another project) This project is aimed to discover possible way to simulate geolocation in indoor environment. But indoor spaces often block cell signals and also make it nearly impossible to locate devices via GPS. With the use of mobile devices containing BLE (Bluetooth low energy) technology, indoor navigation will become possible. Patients and hospital visitors can use their phones to get assistance to their destination. By offering this functionality, patients will be pleased to find that they can find their way within the hospital facility, thus improving their satisfaction. Geolocation could be of major use in healthcare facilities; to help care providers, visitors and patients to navigate, to improve movements and flows efficiency or to implement location-awareness systems.