For all of their awesome applications — from portable navigation devices, to self-driving cars, to cruise missile targeting — the American Global Positioning System and its Russian cohort GLONASS have two fundamental flaws: They don’t work indoors, and they only really operate in two dimensions.

Now, these limitations are fair enough; we’re talking about an extremely weak signal that has traveled 20,200km (12,600mi), after all. Passing through concrete and other solid obstacles is hard enough for a strong, short-range cellular signal — you can’t seriously expect a 50-watt signal traveling 12,000 miles to do the same. Detecting a GPS signal on Earth is comparable to detecting the light from a 25-watt bulb from 10,000 miles.

The situation is a little more complex when it comes to detecting a change in altitude; GPS and GLONASS can measure altitude, but generally the data is inaccurate and too low-resolution (on the order of 10-25 meters) for everyday use. Even with these limitations, though, space-based satellite navigation systems have changed almost every aspect of society, from hardware hacking to farming to cartography to finding a girlfriend.

What if we had a navigation system that worked indoors, though? What if we had an Indoor Positioning System (IPS)? Believe it or not, we’re very nearly already there.

Source: CivSource

IBM is helping cities become more efficient by visualizing and analyzing their physical and digital assets in real-time using location-based analytics. The company intends to do this with two municipal pilot projects in Wilmington, North Carolina and Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The cities will use IBM software and embedded sensors to examine their infrastructure and operations in order to find more efficiencies.

The pilots emerged out of an IBM project in Washington D.C. in which District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water) is utilizing analytics to create a smarter water system based on data coming through IBM’s software from valves, storm drains and service vehicles to optimize its infrastructure, maintenance procedures and improve service delivery.

For the Wilmington, North Carolina pilot IBM will be working with Cape Fear Public Utility Authority (CFPUA) to improve the efficiency of its water and sewage systems using location-based intelligence. The company is partnering with Esri GIS to provide this geolocation service and map nearly 1,500 miles of main lines and 143 pump stations to see in real-time the county’s water and sewer line problems.

In Waterloo, Ontario Canada IBM and Esri will deploy Maximo Spatial, an IBM solution that integrates with Esri, to geographically view and update all of the city’s water-related assets and find efficiencies.

The projects are part of a larger offering from the company, called its Smarter Cities project which hopes to utilize cities worldwide to prove the abilities of the company’s advanced analytics software in creating more efficiency in municipal service delivery. The competitive grant program will award $50 million in technology and services to 100 municipalities worldwide. IBM experts will also provide city leaders with recommendations on smart growth and streamlined service delivery. The program represents the company’s largest philanthropic investment to date.

IBM is announcing Smarter Cities projects in Wilmington, N.C., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and new results from an IBM First-of-a-Kind Research project in Washington, D.C.  

Increasingly, cities are using location-based technology to bring efficiency to their operations and improve the customer experience. They are using IBM software to get both a bird’s eye view of their city infrastructure — roads, buildings and waterways — as well as insight into their operations underground or on the street of the pipes, wires, street lights, electrical meters, storm drains and other assets that make up a city’s infrastructure. Some cities are using embedded sensors to detect faulty pipes or broken streetlights to automatically generate a work order for maintenance staff.

“Cities around the world are getting smarter everyday by monitoring and analyzing the data in their streets, pipes and buildings,” said David Bartlett, vice president of Industry Solutions, IBM. “IBM is delivering a new level of intelligence that helps cities — big or small, new or old — to gain more efficient, sustainable operations.”

Cities around the globe monitor and map their systems using IBM software with mapping and geographic information software (GIS) from IBM business partner Esri.  For example:

• With digital history delivered in real-time to smart phones, workers in the field can act quickly and efficiently to resolve — and even prevent — problems by seeing exactly where a water main is, and its relationship to other underground infrastructure.
• IBM analytics can uncover hidden relationships such as pinpointing the cause of reoccurring issues and pockets of inefficiency, such as one water main that causes expansive seasonal flooding to prevent issues before they impact service.  
• Repair crews address problems from a spatial perspective such as optimizing the driving route of their service trucks to reduce time on the road, prioritizing critical jobs and arming themselves with the detailed history of infrastructure to speed repairs.

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The Instituto do Cancer do Estado de São Paulo(ICESP)—a 28-story cancer clinic said to be the largest public cancer-treatment center in Latin America—is employing a Wi-Fi-based real-time location system (RTLS) to facilitate the way in which its staff responds when a patient goes into cardiac arrest. The solution, provided by RFsense and installed by Synergy Tecnologia, includes Ekahau’s tags and positioning-engine software known as the Ekahau RTLS Controller (ERC), as well as RFsense’s SIGAME software, custom-built for this application to link location data with ICESP’s existing voice-over-IP (VoIP) PBX system.