The sensor internet at work: Locating everyday items using mobile phones

We present a system for monitoring and locating everyday items using mobile phones. The system is based on phones which are enhanced with the capability to detect electronically tagged objects in their vicinity. It supports various functionalities: On the one hand, phones can store the context in which users leave registered items and thus help to locate them later on. On the other hand, object owners can search for their objects using the infrastructure of mobile phones carried by other users. We describe the design of our object location system and provide an algorithm which can be used to search for lost or misplaced items efficiently by selecting the most suitable sensors based on arbitrary domain knowledge. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practicability of such wide-area searching by means of user-held sensors in a series of simulations complemented by a real-world experiment. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.