Indoor Positioning Performance

Indoor Positioning Performance
12 Jan 2020 | Written by James Cobb
Indoor Positioning Indoor Navigation Technology

Indoor positioning has failed to become ‘mass-market’. And we think one of the reasons is the difficulty in assessing the suitability of different solutions for any particular use case.

An obvious performance measure for indoor positioning solutions is accuracy. But it’s not the only important consideration. And fixating on a single number - the accuracy in metres - is likely to be very misleading. Some of the reasons why include:

Alongside accuracy, there are other important performance measures that need to be considered in selecting an indoor positioning solution:

We want to be completely open about our indoor positioning accuracy, and we’re going way beyond publishing a single accuracy number. If you want a single number - our typical accuracy is around 4m. But we don’t believe that tells you very much.

The image above shows a test we did at a real deployment of our technology, in a busy and complex exhibition environment. The joined dots show the positions calculated by our software. We think visualisations like this give a far better indication of performance, and suitability for a particular use-case, than a single accuracy number. Surprisingly we haven’t come across a single other provider who has published a visualisation like this.

We’ll be publishing the results of many more tests in future, and will always try to be 100% open about the performance of our indoor positioning technology.

We encourage every other provider to do the same. And if you come across a provider who simply says their system is ‘2m accurate’ and is otherwise completely silent about performance, start asking some questions.

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