A PDR-Based Indoor Positioning System in a Nursing Cart with iBeacon-Based Calibration

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is widely applied for outdoor positioning. However, GPS signals may degrade in an indoor environment. A nursing cart with a stable and accurate indoor positioning system inside is highly demanded in the hospital. The cart can be used for tracking the employees, or positioning movable medical devices. In this paper, we propose a Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) -based indoor positioning system with iBeacon calibrations. The proposed system can be implemented in resource-limited embedded device. To evaluate the property of the proposed system, real experiments under indoor environments have been conducted. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We also compared the impact of the number of iBeacons on positioning accuracy.