The latest updates to Situm’s location algorithm result in improved positioning quality both indoors and outdoors and increased system accuracy for both guidance and work team monitoring.
How does location influence the user experience of a guidance app or the monitoring of work teams?
Location accuracy is a critical variable for both guidance solutions and smartphone monitoring solutions. If you cannot accurately determine where the device is located, you cannot give directions to a visitor to their destination or effectively manage a geolocation-dependent work team. Ensuring that the display of a worker’s position and trajectories on a control panel or a visitor’s position in a guidance app is consistent and pleasing, is just as important as achieving good accuracy.
While GPS is no longer a problem for outdoor positioning, very few technologies can provide accurate location indoors, and even fewer can do so without deploying an infrastructure that is expensive to install and expensive to maintain. Situm manages to provide the highest accuracy with minimal infrastructure thanks to a self-developed algorithm that collects the signals present inside buildings (magnetic fields, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth) and combines them with the data provided by the inertial sensors of smartphones.
One of the challenges that Situm’s technology must overcome is the instability of the processed WiFi and Bluetooth signals. In a guidance app, the main drawback of this is that the user’s position sometimes “wobbles”, which causes a feeling of uncertainty in the location estimation. In a monitoring solution for work teams, it will cause the display of the tracked trajectories to reflect too many peaks, which will make it difficult to understand, especially when many devices may be consulted at the same time.
Aware of these needs, we have made significant improvements to our algorithms to improve the user experience, whether it is a visitor using a guidance app, or a building manager consulting the graphic analytics with trajectories.
More stable location to improve the user experience of a guidance app
We have improved the processing of WiFi and BLE signals to significantly increase their stability. We have achieved two positive effects. First, the generated position is much more stable, providing a greater sense of accuracy and reliability. Secondly, the radio surrounding the position (which visually represents the error estimated by the algorithm), will dynamically adjust according to the environmental signals being more or less stable.
In short, the person being guided by an app will obtain a more consistent positioning without sudden leaps, much more fluid, reliable, and pleasant.
This improvement will ensure a much more satisfying user experience for shopping malls or airport apps developed on Situm’s platform.
Smoother trajectories to make it easier for managers to audit work teams
This increased stability will also allow building managers and team leaders to have significantly cleaner and more realistic graphical trajectory analytics, with continuous lines (the green line in the image below) rather than sawteeth or erratic trajectories.
This improvement becomes more important the greater the number of trajectories displayed simultaneously.
In this way, the management and auditing of work teams, where mobility is a determining factor for productivity, as in the case of security services or airport PRM assistance, will be simpler and more effective.
If you are interested in learning more about how Situm can help you improve the experience of your visitors or increase the productivity of your work teams, do not hesitate to contact us.