Talk on Location Awareness and Intelligent Environments by Matthias Kranz

Matthias is visiting Newcastle this week (he's delivering the Summer School on Context Awareness on Wednesday) and he gave a talk on his current research yesterday. One of the topics he discussed was the use of cordless phones for indoor/outdoor localisation. It was fascinating to learn about the pervasiveness of DECT-based phones (there are many more than wireless base stations - on average 3 out 4 households in Germany have one) and their properties (long range, low power, reserved frequency band) that make them very well suited for localisation. He presented initial results indicating that the algorithms can be used that were developed for Wifi-localisation. Additionally, Matthias show initial evidence that the theoretical benefits can translate into practical advantages in terms of coverage and precision of the measured location. It will be worthwhile to keep that in mind when designing any smart objects for use in people's homes.