Further development of the Indoor/Outdoor Localization module
Development of a Campus-wide Safely alert system
Organizations with large corporate areas or university campuses must resolve several security incidents that their security department have to manage in real-time. Such areas consist of both open spaces, where mobile phone GPS technology easily provides the incident’s location, as well as built infrastructure, where indoor position calculation must be based on other technologies.
An important piece of knowledge developed during sustAGE is the outdoor-indoor localization procedure. This knowledge has been further developed to support indoor localization using Wi-Fi fingerprinting technology.
The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece with its spinoff company KIKLO, exploits this technology to develop the CampusSafety©, an incident alert system serving the whole University Campus of 42 ha of open spaces, 400,000 m2 of built spaces and its almost 100,000 persons leaving and working every day.
The developed solution (Mobile API and a web GIS Management System) is based on:
Figure1: Campus Safety mobile application in use at AUTH Campus
(a) GPS technology for out-door positioning, (b) WiFi fingerprinting technology, based on the campus-wide eudoram system, for in-door localization, (c) GIS Technology to manage the spatial incident information, (d) a GDPR and user authentication system, (e) an alert management protocol and (g) a dashboard function for overall statistics analysis.
The mobile application is easy to use and provides the end-user the option to select the kind of incident to report (three buttons: [1] Health incident, [2] Security incident, [3] Disaster incident).
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- Figure2a: Campus Safety application
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- Figure2b: Campus Safety application screens
When the user is walking in open space areas, he can select the button for the incident to report and all the necessary actions are processed to alert on the Web GIS Management application.
In case the user is inside a building where no GPS signal is available, the application runs the appropriate algorithms to select the most accurate available localization technology. If indoor Wi-Fi mapping exists, the application extracts an accurate incident spot and completes the incident submission. In cases where no Wi-Fi indoor mapping exists, the application uses the Google location services and proposes to the next Map page the possible incident’s location. Furthermore, geofencing rules enables processes to avoid incident submission outside the area of responsibility.
Specifically, the indoor positioning provides the building, the floor and the room where the incident takes place. When the incident location and the type of incident is submitted, all pieces of information appear in real time at the management Web GIS Application. The appropriate department spots the location of the incident on a Map and the issue is addressed for field support.
Figure 3: Campus Safety location mapping spots