Sensing and classifying indoor environments: An Iot based portable tour guide system

Abstract

Tour guide system, as referred by the name, is a system used for assisting visitors during a tour of a certain place. Increasing tour efficiency while minimizing resources required has been studied by many researchers. The traditional multilingual human tour guides limit in the fact that, they cannot provide personalized information to every visitor because of time constraint. Also, having persons to assist tourists as a guide is expensive. Some tour guide robots and devices were presented in previous works to overcome certain limitations, but some challenges still exist. In this work, an indoor location-aware portable device is presented aiming at improving the user's experience during a tour of an indoor facility. The proposed system can provide personalized audio-visual information based on the location of the visitor, making the visitors independent of following a guide. The core of the module is a Raspberry Pi 3 with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi transceivers. Localization is performed using iBeacons, and RFID technology is used to identify certain objects. The Thingworx platform has been used as the application cloud server while YouTube has been used to present visual feedback to the user.