Commercial Applications for Indoor Location Profiled at WPI
Posted on Fri, Aug 05, 2011
By Carol Politi
I am often asked about the commercial applications for indoor location. “Why would anyone need to locate indoors?"
It can be tough to envision applications that might be generated through capabilities you don’t have. GPS was first funded and deployed for military applications. Without the defense push for GPS the business case for investment would have been very difficult to make. However, the overall market for GPS devices and systems is now expected to grow to over 240 Billion dollars by 2013 (ABI Research) – and a good part of that is driven from the civilian sector.
Indoor location has also been initially driven by Government and Public Safety applications where the demand is the greatest. However, during day two of the WPI Precision Indoor Location and Tracking Workshop, both Qualcomm and Verizon spoke about the immense potential for the consumer indoor location market. Applications discussed included navigation applications within transportation hubs, shopping malls, convention centers, university campuses, hospitals, and office buildings, along with entertainment and social applications. Should we really have to wander around looking for “you are here” signs to find a decent restaurant? I don’t think so. And at some point we will all stop walking around with phones to our ears while we are almost bumping into the person we are supposed to meet.
Today, we can detect proximity from Wi-Fi, but we can’t get to precise indoor location. This is the “last mile” for the location services market. While a number of tagging & infrastructure-based technologies can deliver to precise indoor location, it is tough to make these solutions ubiquitous. At WPI, the view from Qualcomm and Verizon appeared to be that simplicity may win out over precision, and that innovations that depend less on infrastructure may win out.
Regardless of the commercial potential to make our lives more convenient and entertaining - and in TRX’s case to increase the size of the market we are addressing - real lives will be saved by delivering GPS-denied location for the military and public safety markets. At TRX, we remember that every day.