Esri Launches Indoor Positioning System for Facility Wayfinding

Smartphone navigation apps have given people a greater sense of personal freedom, allowing them to efficiently venture from one unfamiliar place to another, still knowing where they are. That sense of knowing can quickly fade once someone has arrived at an airport, corporate campus, or medical center complex. While a global positioning system (GPS) can’t find a doctor’s suite or help medics locate an apartment inside a building, an indoor positioning system can. To meet this demand and bring new understanding of indoor use patterns to improve operational efficiency, Esri, the global leader in location intelligence, has launched ArcGIS IPS. The new product will enable organizations to add indoor location services across their facilities and campuses.

With ArcGIS IPS, maintenance workers can review service requests to immediately identify and navigate to a location inside the building where repairs are needed. To report a new issue, they can log in and mark their position, making it easier for other team members to find that location for follow-up work. As an additional benefit, this type of automation reduces errors that can occur with manual reporting.

ArcGIS IPS enables real-time indoor location services through Esri’s ArcGIS Indoors mobile application and in custom apps built with ArcGIS Runtime SDKs. To implement the system, Bluetooth beacons, also known as iBeacons, are installed inside buildings. These small, one-way radio transmitters send out information that gets picked up by mobile devices. Esri’s ArcGIS IPS Setup mobile app collects radio signals to locate user mobile devices. The user’s location displays as a blue dot on the ArcGIS IPS map, the same way it might display in familiar GPS navigation apps.