A barometer-assisted method to evaluate 3D patient geolocation inside hospital

In the multi-floor hospital architecture, safety for in-patients is empowered if the hospital staff knows their location inside the building. Received signal strength (RSS) based method is commonly utilized in 2D geolocation but not equally efficient in 3D environment, since the signal suffers significant loss when going through ceilings between floors. This paper develops a barometer-assisted approach for 3D indoor geolocation inside hospital and demonstrates its improvement in estimated location error performance. A modified 3D path loss model is illustrated for the horizontal propagation while the vertical estimation error is modeled from barometric fit. By designing scenarios and calculating the 3D Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (3D CRLB), we have conducted a series of simulations and generated the location error CDFs for performance evaluation.