Start-up firm develops "indoor GPS"

An application that allows phone users to access their positioning information within buildings where the traditional system has often proved inaccurate has been devised by a start-up firm in Singapore.

So far more than ten organizations in Singapore have approached the company to discuss deployment and partnerships for the YFind Positioning Systemand. Work on three proof-of-concepts has bee started, reports Xinhua News.

Ting See Ho, co-founder of the firm, said the application works by first verifying the GPS coordinates to identify the building the user is in, and then collecting RSSI readings off WiFi access points within the building.

The information is then sent by the phone to the central positioning server for comparison against records of the radio map of the building, which is calibrated earlier by the company.

Ting said the RSSI readings continually fluctuates, making it difficult to estimate a position. This is where YFind Positioning System steps in with its patent-pending probabilistic algorithms to help accurately estimated the user's indoor positions.

Once the phone application determines the location, then, it is able to map a course for a shop or other destination within the building where the user wants to go.

"You can think of it as creating an 'indoor GPS' environment in the buildings where satellite signals cannot be read," Ting said.

The company's immediate goal is to make Singapore the world's first location-intelligent city before going to other cities, he said.