RESEARCH – USER TRACKING

The project SmartSenior was a large scale research projetc funded by the BMBF an carried out by 28 partners both from research and industry. The goal of the 3 year project was to allow elderly people to live an independent life by supporting them with technological solutions.

In the sub project “secure mobility” we developed an emergency assistance system including digital transmission of health data in real time. The emergency assistant had to work in any possible environments (in the car, on the street, inside a building). In case of an emergency, the assistant would have to provide answers to the classic set of questions related to an emergency (who, what, why?).The “who” was my responsibility in this project.

I have developed a location technology that was capable of detecting the precise location in any given environment and transmit it to the emergency teams. In the outdoor scenario, the location system relied on GPS with a fallback to GSM triangulation. In the car, the location system would connect with the car and get the sensory data from there.

The indoor environment was the most complex. I invented a completely new fingerprinting algorithm which did not rely on maps and that would use arbitrary wifi and bluetooth signals. I implemented two apps. One for the test measuring of new buildings and for the actual location service.

Furthermore, to illustrate how the technology works, I also implented a simulation which was connected to SecondLife and showed how the signals distribute in a virtual building.The technologies used were  .Net, xCode, Java, Java-3D and SOLR.