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I am trying out IBMs Bluemix Presence Insights. At this moment I get an overview of how many divices have been registered in the different zones. I would like to know if it is possible to see the (accurate) location coordinates of the users. If this is possible, could someone give me an estimation of how accurate the positioning is?

Thanks in advance.

John Gerken
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Siebrand Romeyn
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The "location coordinates" are generally not something that Presence Insights exposes to the end user and are instead used internally within the system to do zone resolution. This may be exposed in the data packet coming from certain types of sensors into PI (see https://presenceinsights.ng.bluemix.net/pidocs/connectors) but in general this information will not be helpful for you.

You should upload a map and draw "zones" around the map for places where you want to trigger enter/exit/dwell events. A lot of smoothing and sampling takes place internally to calculate if a mobile user is within one of the zones. However, you will not be able to tell where a device is within a zone.

The best way to figure out how accurate your sensors are for your particular sensor infrastructure is to draw small zones near each other and walk near the devices with your phone and see if your visit pops up in the zone. A number of things will probably affect the accuracy, such as number of sensors, type of sensors, how many pings back to Presence Insights per minute, other configuration options that you set up on the PI UI, and other configuration options that you set with the sensors and/or sensor aggregation server.

I'm sorry that we don't have any hard numbers or charts, maybe this is something we could work on if you find it useful. I can tell you from personal experience that a closed beacon system (uses an aggregation server like MPACT) with enough beacons can become very accurate.

MBillau
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  • Thank you for your reply! For your information we are interested in building an application that allows users to see their location in a building (for this project our building). The locations of the users should be sent to a server so an overview of all thier locations can be made. I would really like to know if Presence Insights is the right tool to realise this. – Siebrand Romeyn Dec 28 '15 at 14:55
  • Hi. Yes, Presence Insights can do this for you - you wouldn't even need another server. You would upload a floor map of the building and draw "zones" around "interesting" areas where you want to get notifications when people are around. You could then see historical information about how many people walked into, dwelled inside, and left each zone, see here: https://presenceinsights.ng.bluemix.net/pidocs/analytics Following the path of each user is not necessarily supported, but you could do this on your own by creating many different zones and tracking the different enter/exit pairs. – MBillau Jan 05 '16 at 18:48
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One thing to keep in mind is that location accuracy is largely a product of the sensing technology used and its configuration. Different sensor vendors have different strategies that they prescribe, but all of them are consistent in that "more is better". Just like GPS, the more access points (satellites) that can see the device, the more accurate the triangulation will be that is passed on to PresenceInsights.

Beacons of course are a separate case because they are proximity devices as opposed to triangulated networks like wi-fi and small cells.

John Gerken
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