A novel indoor localization system for healthcare environments

This paper proposes a novel indoor localization system, specifically designed for use in healthcare environments. The challenge for this indoor localization project is to decide in which room or in which area of a corridor the blindfolded node is situated, and this with a 100% guarantee that the determined location complies with the actual location of the blindfolded node. We propose a decentralized localization algorithm which uses Received Signal Strength information between the beacons and blindfolded nodes, combined with a smart beacon addressing scheme which is used by the localization algorithm. These beacons are existing access points to a backbone network equipped with a wireless interface. By using a proximity-based approach, we are able to decide where a blindfolded node is situated on a low resource and decentralized basis.