Overview of Indoor Positioning Technologies for Context Aware AAL Applications

Many AAL scenarios, such as those found in the public-funded German R&D project SmartSenior, are based on location information about a person, which makes the position key context information. Previous papers have dealt with the design of a SmartSenior positioning system for emergency scenarios, both indoors and outdoors. This paper focuses on non-critical non-emergency scenarios, e.g., activity recognition and indoor navigation. We present the state-of-the-art in indoor positioning and the current research trend towards including additional sensor information to achieve positioning enhancements and gather more context information. After introducing a few interesting scenarios, we present a guideline on how indoor positioning can be classified in technical ways and also in more abstract ways. We also define metrics (accuracy, costs, privacy, context information) which we then use to evaluate the current state-of-the-art research. Based on this evaluation, we discuss possible solutions for the previously presented scenarios.