Indoor Pedestrian Localization Methods Using Contact Information from Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons Between Smartphones

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 digital contact tracing applications for smartphones have become popular worldwide to reduce the effects of the pandemic. We considered that contact information between smartphones used in these applications can be used for the indoor localization of pedestrians. In this paper, we propose two indoor pedestrian localization methods based on contact information obtained from Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons installed in pedestrian's smartphones. Proposed method 1 is multilateration, and proposed method 2 solves a nonlinear optimization problem to further improve the accuracy of method 1. These two proposed methods comprise three steps: (1) the smartphones and anchor nodes recognize the proximity relationship with neighbor nodes using BLE signals transmitted from other smartphones and anchor nodes. The recognized proximity relationship is sent to a server. (2) The server estimates the distance between each node (smartphone or anchor node) from the proximity relationship. (3) The positions of smartphones are estimated based on the distance between nodes estimated by the server. We verified the localization accuracy of the proposed methods through simulation experiments. In an indoor area of 15 m × 30 m, the average localization error of the proposed method 2 was 0.74 m when the pedestrian density was 0.5 /m2. © 2022 IEEE.