About Our Project

The Global Position System (GPS) is widely used as a means for navigation assistance in outdoor applications around the earth. Today, GPS is commonly integrated into many mobile devices including smartphones, making navigation assistance applications very common and portable. Universities around the country have begun taking advantage of this technology and portability to create applications for navigation assistance throughout campuses for mobile users. However, GPS is unreliable when it comes to indoor navigation because satellite signal transmissions are blocked.

The RCPD (Research Center for People with Disabilities) on the campus of Michigan State University (MSU) and our sponsor contact there, Stephen Blosser, proposed a design project to overcome this unreliability. The MSU spring ECE 480 team completed a design by creating the iDOCENT phone application solution by using Wi-Fi triangulation as a means for indoor navigation assistance. The phone application gathers the location of available Wi-Fi access points and assigns a factor based on the signal strength received by the phone from the specific access points, and performs a triangulation algorithm.

The customer’s overall objective is to create a system that will make indoor navigation more feasible for people with disabilities such as the blind. The main problems with the previous iDOCENT project was the inability of the application to work in areas where a Wi-Fi network was not available, or where there may be a Wi-Fi network but not enough access points and the inconsistency of accuracy depending on the amount of access points available. Designing a way to extend the functions of the iDOCENT application to the previously described areas and creating a more consistently accurate system is very important to the system development.

The iNODE for iDOCENT will be supplemental hardware that will work in conjunction with the phone application. The purpose is to place the iNODE in a desired building to increase the accuracy of iDOCENT or allow iDOCENT to be used in areas without a Wi-Fi network. The sponsor given specifications for the iNODE are the use of RF signals for communication with the application and to increase the accuracy consistency of the overall system to always be within ten feet.