Booth Staff Tracker

Fraunhofer IIS's booth staff tracker makes it possible to locate, and determine the status of, staff members in buildings or at trade show booths.

A set of fixed anchor nodes, which know and transmit their positions, are deployed around a trade show booth or part of a building. The exact number of anchor nodes to be used depends on the environment. Each staff member is equipped with a small wireless node.

The anchor and mobile nodes autonomously organize themselves into a multi-hop network. At regular intervals, the mobile nodes transmit their identification codes and other data to a central node, which may be placed at an information desk or in a lobby. As long as a wireless node worn by a staff member is within reception range, its wearer is marked present on an attendance roster.

Information or queries can be sent from the central node to particular staff members. For instance, a person wearing a wireless badge can be informed that a visitor wants to talk to them (paging).

 

Tracking

To determine a staff member's position, a location query is first sent to the wireless node worn by the person being tracked, which in turn transmits their calculated position.

The wireless node autonomously determines its position within the sensor network based both on the anchor nodes in its immediate vicinity and on RSSI (received signal strength indication) readings, i.e. by measuring the strength of signals received from anchor nodes.

 

Features

• Attendance monitoring using multi-hop communication and dynamic routing
• Tracking of staff based on nearby anchor nodes and RSSI
  
• Accuracy: ± 2.5 m on a 10m x 8m show booth equipped with 8 anchor nodes
  
• Frequency: 868 MHz
• Transmission power: < 5 dBm (depending on environment)