WLAN Based User Position Tracking for Contextual Information Access in Indoor Construction Environments

This paper presents research that is investigating the requirements of an automated location-based methodology to rapidly identify and retrieve contextual project information on indoor and outdoor construction sites for supporting decision-making tasks of site personnel. The proposed approach to this retrieval task is the design and implementation of a dynamic user-viewpoint tracking scheme that can allow identification of construction entities visible in a user's field of view at any given time and location. For outdoor applications, a geo-referencing based algorithm has been developed using Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and magnetic orientation tracking devices to successfully track user's dynamic viewpoint. For indoor applications, this research is studying the applicability of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) for dynamic user position tracking. The objectives of this paper are to describe the overall methodology being designed as well as to describe the proof of concept experiments performed outdoors and indoors. The obtained results highlighted the potential of using location-aware technologies for rapidly detecting contextual objects in construction environments.