Potential Value Adding Services for Mazemap's Platform for Indoor Navigation.

Abstract

MazeMap is looking at new potential services to add value to their existing platform for indoor navigation. They are looking at two new additional services, namely indoor navigation for blind and vision impaired and visualization of meeting room capacity in real-time. The main focus of this thesis have been to gather insight in whether or not it exist a market for the proposed solutions, and if they are able to add value to MazeMap's existing solution for indoor navigation.

To actually investigate this literature studies have been conducted for both indoor navigation for blind and vision impaired and visualization of meeting room capacity in real-time. In addition one market survey for each of the services has been conducted to investigate what potential customers think about the proposed solutions and the scope of the problem. The literature study and the results from the market surveys were used to answer the research questions.

The results indicates that European hospitals believe that MazeMap's proposed solution could make it easier for blind and vision impaired to navigate indoor. They do not believe it will save them money compared to the solution they use today with tactile marking and Braille signs. It is important to listen to what and how much information blind and vision impaired needs to navigate indoor. A solution to be adapted be blind and vision impaired needs to be thoroughly tested and to implement egocentric measures, run on commodity hardware and be a supplement to the long cane and trained guide dog.

For visualization of meeting room capacity in real-time the results from the survey shows that this may solve problems related to unhappy employees and increase productivity time in big European companies. The literature study has demonstrated that a sensor based solution can increase the utilization of meeting rooms by over 20\%. A bottleneck of this sensor based service is the capital investment of installing the sensors and the cost of the solution. The potential customer need to evaluate the cost of this against the gain of increased meeting room utilization.