Use of indoor GIS in healthcare

Application domain

Many localization technologies have recently become available for indoor Location Based Services (LBS) and this has opened new research areas and innovation challenges such as the integration of indoor and outdoor location for tracking and managing assets.

Case Study Objectives

The objective of this Case Study is to introduce a group of 4-5 students to the topic of GIS-based indoor LBS and engage them in the development of a real web or mobile application that tracks and visualizes the movement of devices or people.

Provision of training/education CS1

The Case Study will be developed within the course “Geographic Information Systems (GIS)” (10 CFU), offered at Politecnico di Milano. This course is entirely taught in English as part of the MSc in Geoinformatics Engineering. Students attending the course have a background either in Computer Science Engineering or in Environmental Engineering.

Learning contents

Location Based Services (LBS)
Indoor LBS principles
OGC IndoorGML standard
Geospatial Web
WebGIS

Learning outcomes
This Case Study will provide a first approach of a joint teaching effort between university and industry. Students will have the unique opportunity of overpassing the traditional boundaries of a university course, where the notions and concepts taught during the lectures are evaluated at most through ad-hoc exercises or simulations.
Conversely, students will tackle a real case study (proposed by a real company and where a real result is expected) and will benefit from a practical teamwork experience with industry indoor GIS technologies. At the end of the Case Study implementation, students will be able to develop a complete mobile, web or desktop application based on indoor LBS.

Reference partners

Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
TRILOGIS Srl (Italy)

Available training material

The aim of the available training material is to create a WebGIS which tracks the people’s positions in time. This application can be reused in cases of large buildings, like hospitals, for indoor tracking people or objects. Moreover, it can be used for tracking in their home impaired people, like for instance elderly.
The WebGIS shows the planimetric map of the building floor where the experiment was performed and the positions of the tags computed by the indoor positioning system. The WebGIS is enriched by a slider to filter the visualization of the positions in time. Moreover, a hotspot layer of the WebGIS shows where the tags (supposed to be people in the experiment ) have stayed most of the time.

Access each Module metadata to get the complete training Module description.