Sensor-assisted wi-fi indoor location system for adapting to environmental dynamics

Wi-Fi based indoor location systems have been shown to be both cost-effective and accurate, since they can attain meter-level positioning accuracy by using existing Wi-Fi infrastructure in the environment. However, two major technical challenges persist for current Wi-Fi based location systems, instability in positioning accuracy due to changing environmental dynamics, and the need for manual offline calibration during site survey. To address these two challenges, three environmental factors (people, doors, and humidity) that can interfere with radio signals and cause positioning inaccuracy are identified. Then, we have proposed a sensor-assisted adaptation method that employs RFID sensors and environment sensors to adapt the location systems automatically to the changing environmental dynamics. The proposed adaptation method performs online calibration to build multiple context-aware radio maps under various environmental conditions. Experiments were performed on the sensor-assisted adaptation method. The experimental results show that the proposed adaptive method can avoid adverse reduction in positioning accuracy under changing environmental dynamics.