A new technology approach to locating and communicating with individuals inside buildings.
BY JOSH SOOKMAN
A dozen years ago, not many individuals outside of the military had even heard of GPS. Today, it’s in virtually every new car and every smartphone, and many people depend on it as a basic necessity every day. GPS has transformed many aspects of our culture simply by enabling people to locate themselves on a map.
Unless they are inside a building.
The truth is, GPS technology is largely incapable of precisely pinpointing locations inside buildings. Interference from Wi-Fi and other electromagnetic systems as well as concrete walls, steel infrastructure and other structural elements block signals and make it difficult, if not impossible, for the technology to determine exactly what room a person is in, or even what floor they are on.
For the typical wayfinding and commercial applications burgeoning within the GPS field, this is beginning to pose a problem. Retailers in a mall or other shopping facility would greatly benefit from location services for a wide variety of sales-related activities. A number of technology-based solutions incorporating Wi-Fi, beacons and RFID are currently in development for these applications, driven by a variety of business needs to improve profitability.
In the world of risk mitigation, the need is much more immediate and critical. For the security industry, true indoor positioning systems (IPS) capable of pinpointing the location of individuals inside buildings have the potential to transform security operations during and after an incident.
During an active shooter situation, tornado, fire or other event, security personnel have a critical need to know how many people are affected and exactly where they are located. Simply knowing there are many shoppers in a mall isn’t enough; in an emergency, real-time information on precisely where in the building each individual is situated can make a life-or-death difference. Adding an element of communication significantly improves the efficacy of the solution; for example, enabling individuals in a building to inform law enforcement officials of where a shooter is located inside that building, along with other critical details of the unfolding situation. If the communication is bi-directional, more risk can be eliminated as people can be guided or directed through safe passageways to reach shelter or to exit the facility. In a situation such as a chemical spill when the facility needs to be vacated, there is a huge value in knowing if anyone is still inside the building, who and where they are, and who has safely evacuated, along with the ability to help those who need guidance in finding a safe way out.
The most accurate indoor positioning systems today often utilize a blend of technologies to ensure the highest levels of precision, broadest range of device support and affordability. Today’s IPS technologies include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, distributed antenna systems (DAS), LED lighting that emits modulated light specific to an indoor location, magnetic field energy readings from the Earth and embedded sensors in mobile devices. While a number of these approaches are still far from market commercialization, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons form the basis of the current and most common IPS technologies.
Wi-Fi and beacons can be used either independently or combined to create an indoor location map using a variety of methods including triangulation, signal fingerprinting and direct association. All three of these methods depend on individuals carrying smartphones, which makes sense in today’s society, where over 70% of all emergency calls come from mobile phones.
Triangulation, commonly understood in context of cellular towers and GPS to determine location, estimates the relative distance between an individual and at least three radio devices such as Wi-Fi access points or BLE beacons with known locations. Since walls and other objects can interfere with signal strength, this method has significant limitations indoors.
IPS fingerprinting overcomes the interference problems of triangulation. Installing an IPS fingerprinting-based system within a building is a relatively straightforward process. It requires capturing Wi-Fi and/or beacon radio signals from a smartphone in each of the desired locations within a building. Each individual collection (or sampling) of radio signals in a specific room on a specific floor is classified as a “fingerprint.” Once set up, mobile applications can query this IPS infrastructure and the system will have the intelligence to report that mobile user’s location to security.
A third method, direct association, works differently for Bluetooth beacons and Wi-Fi access points. Bluetooth beacons carry unique identifiers; working through an app on a mobile device that captures this identifier, the IPS can pinpoint the location of the device. Wi-Fi networks can be deployed in a number of ways, but most commonly consist of a set of access points, each of which has a unique address that can be identified by a Basic Service Set Identifier (BSSID). The IPS can calculate signal strength between any access point (with a known location) and mobile device to determine the mobile device’s location; however, when used alone this method has lacked the precision of other IPS methods.
For the incidents that are occurring with growing frequency, hybrid IPS technologies combining Wi-Fi and beacons offer the best methodology available to protect individuals, reduce injuries and prevent loss of life.
Hybrid IPS technologies offer the most flexibility in design, better accuracy and a lower total cost of ownership — all of which are great advantages to organizations that have limited security budgets, yet have a strong need to provide a safer environment to customers, personnel and visitors. Beyond that, by leveraging technology that may already be in place, such as existing Wi-Fi networks or beacons in retail environments, they are faster to implement and easier to integrate with existing security protocols and systems. Finally, it makes sense to capitalize on the pervasiveness of mobile devices to build a better way to keep people safer wherever they are — inside or out.
— Josh Sookman is founder and vice president, business development, for Guardly. Guardly’s mobile safety and security solutions for property management and retail customers leverage the latest cloud, mobile, indoor positioning and real-time technologies. For more information, please visit: https://www.guardly.com.