Context aware guidance system using Ultra Wide Band techniques

Context-aware computing is an emerging computing paradigm that can provide new or improved services, which are human centered and proactive in responding to the surrounding environment by exploiting user context information. In this paper an attempt is made to implement the TOA based indoor positioning scheme using Ultra Wide Band (UWB) radio. The TOA values are obtained based on symbol rate samples that are obtained from a square law device. These TOA values are then used for position estimation. Position estimation is done by two methods namely, Direct method and Objective method. It makes use of Kalman filter which processes the available measurements, to estimate the current value of user's position. The simulated results show that the Objective method gives the better performance when compared to Direct method. There are many applications that provide context-aware services based on the location of the user in emergency services which include gas explosions, aircraft crashes, earthquakes, train accidents and tsunami, where there is a major requirement to identify the presence of human beings within the disaster zones and also to provide accurate positioning and personal identification for possible presence of humans under debris.