CINA - A Crowdsourced Indoor Navigation Assistant

With the rise of well-equipped mobile devices in the last years, there is an increasing interest in location based services (LBS). Current LBS mostly cover outdoor scenarios. Indoor LBS just begin to emerge due to technical boundaries. Especially generic indoor navigation assistants for smartphones are still missing or require an extensive infrastructure. Whereas current research is trying to tackle spatial indoor positioning in various ways based on absolute positioning and floor-plans, this project doesn't rely on sensors but solely on relative positioning with crowd sourced information. We use aggregated path information of buildings, consisting of an ordered instruction list recorded and evaluated by users. The concept was experimentally evaluated with a prototype for an indoor navigation assistant that is independent from floor-plans and infrastructure. The evaluation has shown that our concept is practically usable and the implementation is a user-friendly and infrastructure-less system operating at low cost.