What is it about?
Indoor navigation is essential for many applications, from helping people find their way in large buildings to improving emergency response, especially since humans spend around 89% of their time indoors. Our research explores how Apple AirTags—small, affordable, and widely available devices—can precisely locate people indoors. By leveraging the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology inside AirTags, our system, UbiLoc, achieves centimeter-level accuracy without needing any complex calibration. This work demonstrates that AirTags can be repurposed from tracking objects to tracking people, making them a practical tool for smart homes, offices, and public spaces.
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Photo by Đức Trịnh on Unsplash
Why is it important?
We are the first to repurpose Apple AirTags from object tracking to user localization, demonstrating that these widely available, affordable devices can be harnessed for precise indoor navigation. This breakthrough shows that AirTags, commonly used for locating items, can be used to achieve centimeter-level accuracy in locating people, paving the way for innovative applications in smart homes, offices, and public spaces. Our work offers a scalable, accessible solution to indoor localization challenges, bridging the gap between high accuracy and consumer-grade technology.
Perspectives
Developing this paper was an exciting journey that pushed the boundaries of how we think about widely available consumer technology like Apple AirTags. Working on this project allowed us to explore the untapped potential of these devices in a way that hadn’t been done before—using them not just to track items, but to localize people with remarkable accuracy indoors. The idea that affordable, everyday technology could solve complex indoor localization challenges is inspiring, and we hope this paper sparks further innovation in accessible, high-precision localization solutions. Collaborating on this project has been incredibly fulfilling, and we’re eager to see how this work influences both academia and practical applications.
Mohamed Ibrahim
American University in Cairo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: AirTags for Human Localization, Not Just Objects, October 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3681768.3698497.
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