Real-Time Indoor Geolocation Tracking for Assisted Healthcare Facilities

Abstract

A leading cause of physical injury sustained by elderly persons is the event of unintentionally falling. A delay between the time of fall and the time of medical attention can exacerbate injury if the fall resulted in a concussion, traumatic brain injury, or bone fracture. The authors present a solution capable of finding and tracking, in real-time, the location of an elderly person within an indoor facility, using only existing Wi-Fi infrastructure. This paper discusses the development of an open source software framework capable of finding the location of an individual within 3m accuracy using 802.11 Wi-Fi in good coverage areas. This framework is comprised of an embedded software layer, a Web Services layer, and a mobile application for monitoring the location of individuals, calculated using trilateration, with Kalman filtering employed to reduce the effect of multipath interference. The solution provides a real-time, low cost, extendible solution to the problem of indoor geolocation to mitigate potential harm to elderly persons who have fallen and require immediate medical help.