Indian origin develops phone that can tell where you are
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 25 September 2009, 22:24 IST   |    18 Comments
Printer Print Email Email
Indian origin develops phone that can tell where you are
Washington: Led by an Indian origin Professor, Romit Roy Choudhury, computer engineers at Duke University have developed a mobile phone system that could tell which room you are in. Making use of standard cell phone features - accelerometers, cameras and microphones - they have successfully turned the unique properties of a particular space into a distinct fingerprint. Compared to standard global positioning systems (GPS) which are only accurate to 10 meters (32 feet) and do not work indoors, the new application called SurroundSense is designed to work indoors and can precisely tell whether a user is on one side of an interior wall or another. The system uses the phone's built-in camera and microphone to record sound, light and colours, while the accelerometer records movement patterns of the phone's user. This information is sent to a server, which knits the disparate information together into a single fingerprint. "As the system collects and analyzes more and more information about a particular site, the fingerprint becomes that much more precise. Not only is the ambience different at different locations, but also can be different at different times at the same location," said Choudhury. The students went out across Durham, N.C. with their cell phones, collecting data in different types of businesses and "mirrored" the actions of selected customers so that they would not bias the measurements. This could well be an early step towards improving indoor localization. The details of SurroundSense will be presented at the 15th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking in Bejing.

siliconindia