Capability Assessment of Indoor Positioning Systems

Abstract

Location systems are seen as a promising technology for tracking people and objects to improve efficiency and quality in the healthcare domain. To increase the chances of success when introducing this new technology there are certain operational capabilities that need to be understood. The purpose of this Thesis is to explore how these operational capabilities can be assessed by experiment. The thesis proposes a method for describing the operational capabilities of a location system using a two-dimensional matrix of purposes of location systems in the healthcare domain, as found in literature. Using this matrix it is possible to assess and predict the requirements for a location system based on a classification of the purpose of the installation. Conversely it is possible to use the same matrix to find purposes that can be solved with a given location system. Using the Sonitor Indoor Positioning System it was also demonstrated how the operational capabilities of a location system could be found through a series of small low cost and low effort experiments. In conclusion three dimensions relating to operational capabilities were identified: granularity, resolution, and concurrency. Granularity and concurrency were shown to be successfully assessed through experiment, while resolution was found analytically. We also found a method to predict the impact of infrastructure size on the operational capability of the location system based on the same small experiments.