Make it Trackable: An Instant Magnetic Tracking System With Coil-Free Tiny Trackers

Ambient intelligence aims to actualize the environment that sense and utilize information around us without making us perceive the underlying systems. This work extends this concept by allowing us to track the movement and orientation of people and objects instantly. The proposed system can sense and let us know, for example, who met or talked to each other frequently, to whom s/he is often facing in the meeting, what stuffs people often use, where the person left his/her belongings, etc. Such information will help the system to understand the behavior patterns of each person and consequently can support and improve the personal life of users and even their mutual relationship. This article proposes an instant indoor magnetic tracking system that enables us to track the movement and orientation of people and objects by only attaching tiny electronic trackers to them. The size of the prototyped tracker is only 25.4mm
$\times25.4$
mm
$\times10.0$
mm, and hence it can be readily attached to almost anything and immediately activated. Evaluation results show that the proposed system applies to both room-scale tracking and tabletop scale tracking with 6 DoF (Degrees of Freedom).