Easy indoor wayfinding: public vs. professional use

Indoor wayfinding guides users quickly and easily through unknown building complexes and associated outdoor areas. Destinations can be selected at the touch of a fingertip, and the route to the destination is displayed on a map on the user’s own smartphone. In Europe indoor navigation is often used synonymous to indoor wayfinding.

In commercial structures, public indoor wayfinding is therefore initially a stand-alone service that provides an improved visitor experience at airports, train stations, hospitals or large shopping centres. But think of office buildings or a university campus: users simply have more time to focus on the real reasons for their visit or stay. Indoor wayfinding saves the user nerves and time that could be better spent otherwise.

Indoor wayfinding as an commercial enabler

Indoor wayfinding in professional use

Indoor wayfinding can also be used professionally. The difference is as follows: While in the above examples the user WANTS to be guided to a certain POI of his own accord, a user in a professional environment MUST reach a certain POI as quickly and reliably as possible. Especially in professional situations the following applies: Time is money. Service and repair teams do not have time to waste with an excessive search for the destination. The same applies to parcel delivery companies and other service providers. In turn, your own personnel save the time they would have to spend accompanying teams or explaining routes. Employees, too, can save a great deal of time in large corporate buildings if they have their personal and reliable multilingual guide to conference room 3:12.4 in their pocket and do not have to leave half an hour early.

Indoor Wayfinding as a professional safety feature

In other situations, indoor wayfinding is a professional safety feature. In combination with person tracking, indoor wayfinding reliably guides security or rescue teams to the location of a target person, be it an injured worker or a person who is in company premises that he or she is not authorized to visit. In the second case in particular, it is important to note that the data collected through people tracking is real-time data. This means that teams are always guided to the current location of the target person and not to where the person was last seen.

Requirements for Indoor Wayfinding

Indoor wayfinding from Favendo has two requirements:

• Transmitter infrastructure
• App with feature-SDK
• Server backend

Favendo is specialized in the setup of Bluetooth Low Energy infrastructures consisting of discrete or embedded installed BLE beacons and beacon trackers. As a rule of thumb, four beacon trackers can cover an area of around 100 square meters. In practice, however, this value varies depending on the required accuracy and the architectural conditions.If the infrastructure is to be used simultaneously for people tracking, tags are required, which the people to be tracked must wear in the form of a wristband or a badge. In addition, there is the server backend, where the sensor data is converted into position data.

With mere indoor wayfinding, one talks about clientbased positioning, because the positioning is done on the user’s device (client). The smart phone interprets the signals of built-in beacons. This makes also clear that people tracking and indoor navigation are two sides of one coin.

Favendo has various technology stacks and different methods of position calculation at its disposal to develop a customized solution for each individual use case. We are partnering with market leaders like Abeeway and Quuppa for best solutions.