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G. Retscher:
"Pedestrian Navigation Systems and Location-based Services";
Talk: 5th IEE International Conference on 3G Mobile Communication Technologies 3G 2004, London, UK (invited); 2004-10-18 - 2004-10-20; in: "5th IEE International Conference on 3G Mobile Communication Technologies 3G 2004", (2004), 5 pages.

Pedestrians have often ways in unfamiliar urban environment or in complex buildings. In these cases they need guidance to reach their desired destination, for example a specific room in a local authorities’ building, a counter, or a department at an university. The goal of location-based mobile services is to provide such guidance on demand (anywhere, anytime), individually tailored to the actual information needs and presented in preferred forms. Thereby the navigation service requires positioning and tracking capabilities of a mobile user with a certain positioning accuracy and reliability. Especially navigating in urban areas is a very challenging task as pedestrians move in spaces where no one of the known positioning techniques works continuously in standalone mode and the movement is in a much more complex space than 2-D networks (i.e., on pedestrian paths and along roads, outdoor and indoor, through underground passages, etc.). To solve this challenging task of continuous position determination, a combination of different location technologies is required. The integration of the sensors should be performed in a way that all the sensors are tightly coupled in the sense of a so-called multi-sensor system. In a new research projet on our University entitled "Pedestrian Navigation Systems in Combined Indoor/Outdoor Environements (NAVIO)" we are working on the improvement of such navigation services. We believe that these services will play an important role in the field of location-based services in the near future as a rapid development has already started which is driven by their possible applications. The project is mainly focusing on the information aspect of location-based services, i.e., on the user’s task at hand and the support of the user’s decisions by information provided by such a service. Specifications will allow to select appropriate sensor data and to integrate data when and where needed, to propose context-dependent routes fitting to partly conflicting interests and goals as well as to select appropriate communication methods in terms of supporting the user guiding by various multimedia cartography forms. To test and to demonstrate our approach and results, the project takes a use case scenario into account, i.e., the guidance of visitors to departments of the Vienna University of Techology. First results of our project will be presented in this paper.

http://aleph.ub.tuwien.ac.at/F?base=tuw01&func=find-c&ccl_term=AC04968239