Hacker News Reader

Comment by linkeex | Hacker News Reader

From my experience as someone who has already implemented an complete iBeacon based iOS App that is used as an art gallery guide I don't believe that this indoor location tracking you're advertising is working when there is more than one person in the room.

As my academic advisor always said: Every human is an 80kg water bag thats disturbing the signal.

Did you test this with multiple persons in the room and if so, what was your result concerning accuracy.

View on HN

You are right that people and their bodies might absorb Bluetooth radiowaves, but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize that effect.

This is the first version of our SDK and we encourage developers in our community to test different setup with more beacons or beacons located a bit higher, so there is always a line-of-sight between phone and beacons.

> [...] but our solution does combine several different techniques to minimize that effect.

Can you elaborate on this techniques? What is it exactly that you're using?

We have a team of data engineers in data science and PhD's measuring all the signals we receive from the beacons and performing algorithms (e.g. trilateration, least squared etc) and combining this with positioning signals we can process based on positioning of the device. The trick is to account for different devices, different antenna placement on models etc. So over time we build a database that improves accuracy based on usage. Regarding people being present, we can account for that if we predict that signals are reflecting differently based on estimated density. These are super challenging problems so we have a team dedicated to it, and iterate quickly.

Cool, thanks for answering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com