Week 6
After six weeks of research into indoor localization, we have made the decision of prototype for our final work. We didn’t choose haphazardly; we developed three idea’s in detail and compared them with three parameters:
What’s our target group?
How difficult will it be to implement the app, in relation to the given time?
Is it economically interesting ?
The three mobile app candidates where the following
Book and receive information on meeting rooms
Guide people on a tour
Push geolocalized advertisement to consumers
We decided to go for the first one. Booking meeting rooms is a tedious process. You have to spend a lot of time finding a room that’s available and has enough space for your colleagues. There are several scenarios that makes you lose precious time. Below are three examples that illustrate the difficulty and the time consuming process of booking a room.
You didn’t take time to book a room in advance. You walk through the building and find a room that seems free. You can either choose to install yourself there, with the probability to be disturbed soonish or to lookup the database to find if it’s booked. Both choices are time consuming.
You didn’t take time to book a room in advance. You walk through the building and don’t find any available room that’s appropriate for your meeting. Either there are indeed no rooms available at this moment, or more likely, some people didn’t take the time to book their room. You have to lookup the database to find an appropriate room. Again loosing time on administrative stuff.
You have realized that you have to take time to book a room in advance. You decided to use, the not-so-user-friendly booking tool from your company. You will probably need your computer first and after a few complicated minutes, you have finally booked the meeting room. You are happy that you have achievement something. When you open the meeting room, you see it’s actually not empty. An intern didn’t take the time to book a room in advance. Both you and the intern’s team did lose productivity time.
I think you get our point. “But hey guys! What’s the relation between meeting rooms and indoor localization?” I know you would ask that question dear visitor. The booking-room-app will give you the ability to find out if the room at your position is available (or not) and give you the ability to book it. We don’t want you to lose time walking miles in the office to find out where you can book one. So our app will cover an extra scenario
You have found an empty and adequate room for your meeting but you don’t know if it’s booked.
You don’t know where you can find an empty and adequate room for your meeting.
Such application can be useful for businesses but can be also applied in other domains like educational environments.
We have experienced such hassle in our internships. We want to offer a way to facilitate booking rooms. By developing a mobile application, our goal is to book and check information of the rooms. That can be interesting for businesses but also other domains such as schools. No more annoyance about the book-a-room-for-the-meeting process.
Our thesis reviews different technologies of indoor localization. Bluetooth Low Energy has the most attractiveness for our prototype. It’s a relative cheap technology and is already used in several industries. Implementing a undiscovered method would be very tricky and time-consuming without the certitude to deliver a working application. Hereby we made the decision to use BLE and beacons for the mobile application.
Next week’s to do’s includes the scenario’s of our meeting application together with the first wireframes.
See you next sunday!