Choosing an RSS device-free localization algorithm for Ambient Assisted Living

Device-free localization algorithms attract, among others, the attention of researchers working in the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) scenarios, where the target user might not be able or willing to wear any devices. We concentrate on systems that exploit the Received Signal Strength indicator coming from wireless devices whose position is known, called anchors. In this paper we select and test the main device-free localization solutions and experimentally compare their performance using a smaller number of anchors than commonly found in the literature. We illustrate the procedure used to validate our comparing procedure and we give suggestions on usability in the application scenarios typical of AAL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first direct comparison between different device-free algorithms using the same input data for all of them, and the first one that compares their performance with a varying number of anchors. Thanks to the characteristics of our comparison procedure, we can make suggestions about the more appropriate algorithms to use for different kinds of applications.