Designing and developing a mobile application for indoor real-time positioning and navigation in healthcare facilities

BACKGROUND: Navigation portable applications have largely grown during the last years. However, the majority of them works just for outdoor positioning and routing, due to their architecture based upon Global Positioning System signals. Real-Time Positioning System intended to provide position estimation inside buildings is known as Indoor Positioning System (IPS). OBJECTIVE: This paper presents an IPS implemented as a mobile application that can guide patients and visitors throughout a healthcare premise. METHODS: The proposed system exploits the geolocation capabilities offered by existing navigation frameworks for determining and displaying the user’s position. A hybrid mobile application architecture has been adopted because it allows to deploy the code to multiple platforms, simplifying maintenance and upgrading. RESULTS: The developed application features two different working modes for on-site and off-site navigation, which offer both the possibility of actual navigation within the hospital, or planning a route from a list of available starting points to the desired target, without being within the navigable area. Tests have been conducted to evaluate the performance and the accuracy of the system. CONCLUSION: The proposed application aims to overcome the limitations of Global Navigation Satellite System by using magnetic fingerprinting in combination with sensor fusion simultaneously. This prevents to rely on a single technology, reducing possible system failures and increasing the scalability.