A Self-Adapting Algorithm based on Atmospheric Pressure to Localize Indoor Devices

Modern smartphones are nowadays equipped with a multitude of sensors, which extend their capabilities paving the way for a multitude of services. Among these, the ability to locate the device is exploited by many. While outdoor the GPS provides good accuracy, indoor localization is challenging to be performed with it, as buildings shadow the satellite signal. In particular, the barometric pressure sensor is often used to determine the altitude of the device from the ground floor, particularly for safety applications and indoor navigation. However, pressure changes during the day, and thus it is challenging to bind a static value to a specific altitude. In this work, we propose a self-adapting algorithm able to determine the height at which the device is in a building, by exploiting the barometric pressure. We implemented and tested our algorithm on an Android application, and we compared it against other techniques. We tested our proposal for three specific use-cases, and our results show the benefit of our proposal.