Skip to main content

MTI's Indoor Location Positioning Based on Ultrasonic Sound at MWC 2015

Every year I love going to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Besides the hands-on time with new phone models and new technologies, I like to meet with people from all over the world, both in start-up companies and at major companies, that are developing innovative new technologies.

A year ago I reported seeing indoor location positioning technology from a company in Japan called MTI, based on an innovative approach using ultrasonic sound. In a nutshell, MTI deploys small speaker units that transmit ultrasonic sound signatures, that people can't hear but that can be received on a smartphone's microphone. Each speaker unit, acting as a beacon, transmits a unique signal. The MTI application on a smartphone will receive a collection of those signals, from all the speaker units within range, along with volume levels for each signal that indicates how far away the speaker unit is from the phone. Given a database of locations of the speaker units, MTI's system uses multilateration to estimate the location of the phone based on the signals from the speaker units and the known locations of those speaker units.

In 2014, MTI's technology was fairly raw, as can be seen on my video from then. One year later, at MWC 2015, MTI has a polished system that demonstrates indoor location position that is reliable (even in a very noisy environment such as MWC) and fairly accurate. Moreover, MTI has several deployments, and will soon be marketing worldwide. My video of MTI's technology is below.

MTI is a major company in Japan, but this indoor location solution was developed by a small 6 person team. Their progress from MWC 2014 to MWC 2015 is fantastic.

MTI is one of the first companies to bring ultrasonic based indoor location positioning to market, but they're not the only ones working on it. Ultrasonic is one of a dozen or so indoor location technologies, and MTI is one of over 150 companies, analyzed and profiled in the recently updated Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies. See the Grizzly Analytics blog for more technology from MWC and elsewhere.

Here's the video of MTI's technology at MWC 2015:



Will indoor location positioning reach a "tipping point" and spread through the market in 2015? Will everyone soon be using their phones to navigate around a mall as they now navigate around the countryside? Will Facebook and Twitter know which coffee shop you're checking into, instead of just knowing which shopping mall you're in? Indoor location positioning technologies, from MTI and over 150 other companies, are gaining more strength and market success every day.

Check back soon for more on indoor location technology and other mobile innovations. You can also follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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

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

Quuppa - The newest and oldest in indoor location positioning

Word is starting to get out about Quuppa , a company formed in September 2012 that's developing very high accuracy indoor positioning technology (HAIP).  To Quuppa, "high accuracy" means roughly 20cm.  Yes, 20cm. 8 inches. That's an order of magnitude better than the 4-5m accuracy that other start-ups are bringing to market, and two orders of magnitude better than the 15-20m accuracy that mass-market approaches like Google's are delivering. Update March 2015: See here for more up-to-date information on Quuppa. As of now this high level of accuracy is available only for tracking dedicated tags.  It won't be available for cellphones until some new Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) features become standard. (On cellphones they're working on other good, but not quite as accurate, positioning.)  But check out their demonstration - in this game of basketball, the players have tags on their shoes, and the ball has a tag inside. Pretty amazing for a company fou...
Read more