SIMON macht mobil : Die Cloud ermöglicht personalisierte Mobilität
Drei Forscher der Universität Duisburg-Essen haben sich nach mehreren Jahren Forschung mit der Firma Locoslab selbständig gemacht. Locoslab GmbH ist ein 2012 ins Leben gerufene Spin-off der Universität, das cloud-basierte Produkte und Dienstleistungen rund um das Thema Lokalisierung anbietet. Vielfältige Anwendungsmöglichkeiten durch den technischen Einsatz des so genannten RF (Radio Frequencing) Fingerprinting, beispielsweise in den Bereichen Navigation auf Flughäfen, in Einkaufszentren oder auf Messen. So können personalisierte Mobilitätslösungen realisiert werden.
Three researchers at the University
of Duisburg-Essen opened a company
called Locoslab after several
years of research in the area of localization.
This article discusses the
experiences of the research team in
the design, development and reallife
testing of SIMON Mobile, a
mobile application that uses a cloud
infrastructure to provide support
for mobility impaired users for different
cities like Madrid, Parma,
Lisbon and Reading. The application
is the main product of three
years of collaborative research as
part of the SIMON European project,
that involves researchers from
Spain, Italy, Portugal and Germany.
The main asset of the application is
the seamless integration of indoor
and outdoor navigation routes and
the fact that the computed routes
take into account the characteristics
of the user in terms of capabilities
and preferences. At the time of this
writing, SIMON Mobile has been
available for several months at the
Google and Apple App Stores and
has been downloaded over 1000
times with very good user feedback.
Additionally, all of the operations
from the computation and retrieval
of the map tiles to the algorithm that
computes the optimal route for the
user, are performed in the cloud.
The client application simply acts as
the local device where the information
from the cloud is presented in
the appropriate form to the user.
This has the advantages that routing
algorithms, for example, can be
improved on the cloud backend and
do not require the update of the
application on the client side in
order to use the new and improved
services.