Ask HN: Best technologies for indoor position tracking?

I have a hobby project in mind but I'm not sure which technologies will give me the most bang for my buck long term.

I want to track my 3D position accurately within my apartment. My first use case is to track how long I sleep and how long I watch TV etc. without using some sort of reporting mechanism. I would like to incrementally add more advanced features such as gesture recognition for integration with smart devices etc.

I have read about using RF signals and signal processing to track 3D motion indoors without using wearables (https://www.emeraldinno.com/publications). There must be ways to do it with wearables and bluetooth. Posyx (https://www.pozyx.io/) works with UW signals.

Has anyone had experience with a similar project? Which technologies did you use? Is there specific hardware you would reccommend?

I would start with room level tracking using off the shelf BLE Beacons and work your way up from there. I've used beacons from https://estimote.com/ before, they also sell an indoor tracking solution that triangulates a smartphone from BLE beacons plus sensor fusion to place a user on a floor plan, but that might be too costly for your project at this stage.

Can you be more specific on "accurately". There are many indoor nav systems leveraging various radio technology (BLE/WiFi/LoraWAN), ultra sound http://cricket.csail.mit.edu/ , magnetic indooratlas.com. All have pros and cons and various levels of accuracy that depend on the environment.

Good luck!

I used to work for an IoT startup on Boston that worked on this exact thing and then the company folded four days after I got married, two years ago. Fun times.

Anyhoo, we used Impinj readers and RFID tags to track things indoors. One of our clients was a Norwegian shipyard who wanted to keep track of their tools because apparently, tools for fixing ships are expensive and people like stealing.

You put the Impinj readers on the ceiling on both sides of a doorway and make sure your API throttles the reads so you can make sense of the data deluge.

I just wrote/designed the dashboards and interfaced with our internal API. If you have more questions I can ping the guys that worked on the back-end.

Does it work for accurate positioning though?

Many thanks for your question! It prompted me to rethink a problem in Home Telehealth and Elder-Care having to do with tracking Dementia patients. Anyway, a PubMed paper published 2018-1-24 titled: Passive Infrared (PIR)-Based Indoor Position Tracking for Smart Homes Using Accessibility Maps and A-Star Algorithm (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5855945/) may help you.

The paper is about using passive infrared sensors (active badge etc.) to accomplish indoor position tracking. This may be overkill for your need but I figured I'd put it out there for you anyway. I hope to have some follow up information in a couple of days and will revisit this question.