Skip to main content

GeoFencing meets Indoor Location

We've written a lot about indoor location positioning technology.  At last count it's being researched by several dozen major mobile companies and developed by almost forty start-up companies.  We've blogged about systems from Nokia, SenionLab, Meridian, Pole Star and others.  The technologies for indoor location positioning include Wi-Fi fingerprinting, sensor fusion, Wi-Fi network-centric tracking, dedicated Bluetooth beacons, hybrid approaches, and more.  The field is exploding.

We've also written recently about GeoFencing.  GeoFencing enables an action to be taken when a device enters or leaves a specific geographical area.  Our recently released report on GeoFencing includes 145 pages of details of R&D by all the major mobile companies and a growing number of start-ups.

Today these two hot areas, Indoor Location and GeoFencing, meet each other, in the form of SenseWhere's GeoWhere.  GeoWhere uses SenseWhere's indoor positioning technology to track people through GeoFences both indoors and outdoors. GeoWhere was just announced, and we expect to see it deployed in the market soon.

GeoWhere's GeoFences are aimed to be used for mobile advertising, friend-finding, content pushing, child monitoring, in-app notifications, SMS and e-mail sending, and more.  GeoFences can be defined both on the web and on mobile devices, both indoors and outdoors.  GeoWhere can be used to remind phone users when they're passing a drugstore, to notify parents when children are leaving their school, to display promotions to customers walking by a store in a mall, to monitor the locations of elderly people moving around an assisted living area, and much more.

As the company writes:  "The solution is equipped with a range of features including integration with mobile advertising and marketing platforms, customisable indoor maps, configurable settings for specific people or groups including friends/family and settings for hybrid areas exploiting SenseWhere's positioning accuracy. A specific Geo-Fence could also be activated within specific times and trigger notifications and messages which can be sent as email, SMS text message and in app notification messages. The GeoWhere platform also addresses fundamental issues such as mobile device battery efficiency while providing precise positioning through the use of SenseWhere's propriety technology."

While SenseWhere is not releasing an end-user app right now, they're releasing a highly scalable platform that can be deployed by telecom operators and other big players.  There are reportedly some huge companies working on services based on their platform, to be announced soon.

GeoFencing and Indoor Location Positioning are truly "two great tastes that taste great together."  Each one complements the other: Indoor positioning makes GeoFencing pervasive, and GeoFencing makes indoor location applications more straightforward to implement usefully.

We look forward to SenseWhere's GeoWhere, and other systems that integrate these two technology areas, bringing useful apps and services to market.

Want to know more about GeoFencing technology and Indoor Location Positioning technology?  Check out the Grizzly Analytics in-depth reports on mobile industry R&D in Indoor Location Positioning and GeoFencing.  Feel free to contact us with any questions.

Popular posts from this blog

Sensor-fusion indoor location system in over 30 malls in Singapore

SingTel just deployed indoor mapping and navigation from Swedish start-up  SenionLab  in over 30 shopping malls in Singapore, with 20 more in planning, in the biggest single deployment we've seen yet of customized indoor location technology. The most significant aspect of this deployment is that this is one of the first commercial deployments of indoor location technology that uses a new technology approach called "sensor fusion," which uses sensors in smartphones (gyroscope, compass, accelerometer, ...) to track location by sensing the phone's movements. Most indoor location systems determine location by measuring the signals of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots or cellular antennas, but this risks looking choppy as the phone waits for the radio signals to change to detect the next place it is. Sensing motion using phone sensors makes the system work more smoothly, regardless of radio signal details.  (The SenionLab solution does use Wi-Fi signals as well, to compe...
Read more

Seeing Quuppa's indoor location technology at MWC 2015

I first met Fabio and Kimmo from Quuppa in 2012 , before Quuppa existed, when they had spent years researching indoor location positioning technologies at Nokia Research Center. Less than a year after that they formed Quuppa , independent of Nokia, to bring their technology to market. At the time I called Quuppa " the newest and oldest in indoor location positioning ." Fast forward two and a half years. Their technology has reached market, it can now track both smartphones and BLE devices, and it's accurate to within 20-50cm. Before reading more about their technology, take a look at a video of their demo  in action: Grizzly Analytics has analyzed indoor location technologies by over 150 companies , and virtually all of the radio-based technologies operate by measuring the distance  between the device being tracked and other radio devices, and using these distance measurements for either multilateration or fingerprinting. For example, the well known BLE beacons me...
Read more

See great indoor location tech from the 2017 testbed

The videos from the Indoor Location Testbed at GeoIoT World 2017 are now released! Here is your chance to see how these solutions performed in our real-world evaluation, in the videos below. The testbed evaluated each solution by walking around a real-world venue, the GeoIoT World 2017 conference, measuring performance at 10 pre-selected points. Click here for the testbed report, which analyzes each solution's performance in a wide variety of metrics, including real-time accuracy, accuracy stabilization, consistency, latency, floor change, first fix, setup time & more. Let's start with BlooLoc's tag-based solution, which achieved accuracy under 2m in real-time and under 1.5m after stabilization: Then let's look at the infrastructure-free solution from GipsTech , which achieved accuracy under 2m without using any beacons or radio signals: Next is GipsTech's solution with BLE added: Next is BlooLoc's phone-based solution: Fin...
Read more