SmartMart: IoT-based In-store mapping for mobile devices

Quite often, when shopping in a supermarket (e.g. Walmart), shoppers are frustrated at locating the items on the shopping list and no assistance is available. On the other hand, retailers also lose a large volume of sales as a result. In this paper, we present a feasibility study that leverages the Internet of Things (IoT) technology to make store items “smart” so that they can automatically register and update their location information in an information retrieval system, allowing shoppers to search, locate, and map them on the store floor plan using mobile devices. A free-accessible Android-based mobile app SmartMart has been developed to demonstrate the promise of this preliminary work. Continuous development of this research could lead to a complete change in our day-to-day shopping experience.