SBOT: A Social Media Based Object Tracking System

Indoor object tracking technology can be applied to various applications, such as equipment tracking, people finding, and geo-fence. With the support of indoor object tracking services, users can locate the objects they are interested in and then make appropriate arrangement or provide adequate responses to emergency. In order to provide users with an instant notification, mobile app is an essential part of the object tracking infrastructure. However, developing and maintaining a mobile app could be costly. The possible expenses include app store fees, security certification, and cross-platform testing and so on. Fortunately, due the popularity of social-media apps and the advance of IoT (Internet of Thing) technology, there is a growing trend to integrate social-medial apps with IoT so as to provide users with a user friendly and easy-to-use UI (User Interface). In this paper, we present a social-media based object tracking system, named SBOT, which combines the popular social media LINE with an object tracking system. SBOT has two major functions: equipment tracking and geo-fence. Users can use LINE interface to locate the equipment and get instant message when the equipment has been moved out of the predefined boundaries. SBOT also supports access control to authorize users' operations to avoid possible security and privacy issues. In order to evaluate the practicability of SBOT, we conducted a field trial in National Taiwan University Hospital Yunlin Branch. More than 40 beacons were deployed in the orthopedics ward to trace 17 mobile medical devices at the same time. Our results show that SBOT can achieve 3 to 5 meters position accuracy and attend a 5-second response time to cross-boundary events.