A Cooperative Localization Technique for Tracking in Hospitals and Nursing Homes

Nowadays numerous technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular networks and magnetometer positioning are employed for tracking patients and assets in hospitals or nursing homes. Each of these techniques has advantages and drawbacks. For example, WiFi localization has relatively good accuracy but cannot be used in case of power outage or in the areas with poor WiFi coverage. Magnetometer positioning or cellular network does not have such problems but they are not as accurate as localization with WiFi. This paper describes technique that simultaneously employs different localization technologies for enhancing stability and average accuracy of localization. The proposed algorithm is based on fingerprinting method paired with data fusion and prediction algorithms for estimating the object location. Significant performance improvement was showed in practical scenarios.

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