Web based mapping and way-finding are hugely popular, with companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft all providing real-time services to millions of users globally. In most cases these way-finding services are used to navigate while outdoors and in while you are in transit. These services primarily use a mixture of GPS and WiFi to provide location services to you.
Indoor navigation and way-finding is a more complex problem to fix as GPS does not work accurately indoors and also can’t provide an indication of floor level.
At Deakin we currently provide an opt-in way-finding service for our students, staff and visitors called Deakin Scout.
Once you have installed the Scout mobile app and shared your location Scout utilises our expansive wireless network to triangulate the positions of your mobile phone to assist with indoor navigation and way-finding. Although Scout is great, it is still a single data source to inform indoor location and has a certain level of accuracy.
To improve this we are experimenting with additional data sourced directly from the mobile device and machine learning to improve accuracy – see below for how this might be achieved!
Locational Accuracy