Nokia's Location Sensor Concept 'Keychains' To Lead Hybrid LBS  

Posted by: shilpz in , , , , ,


One of the more interesting announcements at CES 2009 was Nokia's Location Sensor concept, but since it recalls GPS location tech already available, it sort of flew under the radar. But new information revealed recently on the Nokia Research site suggests that the company has bigger ideas than just finding an easier way to find your lost keys through sensors.
The LBS (location-based services) concept is rounding out to feature a full indoor service for large buildings and institutions (like hospitals) that improves on current GPS tech. It will most likely aggregate a sensor's location through a combination of RFID tags, bluetooth, and NFC to send direct info to your cell phone. The hybrid LBS system should improve upon the current limitations of GPS tech, according to a Nokia research doc: "[GPS devices] don't work well in the structures in which we find ourselves every day, such as offices, shopping malls, hospitals. . . 80 percent of our time is spent indoors."


Among the limitations most often mentioned are transmission problems (with terrain, distance and interference effects), length of finding a location, and battery drainage. Adding multiple reference data points into one easily accessible app should greatly improve location accuracy. Other companies already have LBS locators that push location info to websites, but access is still restricted.
The current version of the concept includes sensors embedded in a keychain-sized box (see right) that is hitched to individual personal items. The sensor wirelessly sends the location info of each item to a smart phone app that tracks and manages each item. The distance range of each sensor is around 100 meters for now, but they're working on extending it.
The sensor concept also supports 100 individual sensors at the same time. There's no word on how often it will update location data, or whether this only includes sensors provided by Nokia. The most useful application, of course, would be one that was open and compatible with other LBS services.
The potential applications for this tech are numerous.
The LBS advertising seen in Minority Report could make shopping more useful and promotions would be easily tailored to people walking through their doors. Of course, customers should have the option to turn it off and be OK on getting called on their last underwear purchases by a giant smiling screen saying your name for all to hear. I'd love it if the app automatically geo-tagged your pics down to specific halls of large museums, like NY's Metropolitan. Currently, an LBS in Japan sends messages to sleeping train riders when they reach their destination.
According to Gartner analysts, the number of people receiving LBS services will move from 43 million in 2009 to 300 million by 2011.
But improved, hybrid LBS isn't the only interesting application the Nokia research team is working on. Recently, the company demoed Point & Find, a tech that helps mobile users find info about show times and prices of movies by pointing their camera phones at movie posters.


This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 03, 2009 and is filed under , , , , , . You can leave a response and follow any responses to this entry through the Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) .

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