On-device indoor place prediction using WiFi-RTT and inertial sensors

High-accuracy and low-latency indoor place prediction for mobile users can enable a wide range of applications for domains such as assisted living and smart homes. In this paper, we propose GoPlaces, a practical indoor place prediction system that works on mobile devices without requiring any new infrastructure. GoPlaces does not rely on servers or specialized localization infrastructure, except for a single cheap off-the-shelf WiFi access point that supports ranging with Round Trip Time (RTT) protocol. GoPlaces enables personalized place naming and prediction, and it protects users’ location privacy. It fuses inertial sensor data with distances estimated using the WiFi-RTT protocol to predict the indoor places a user will visit. GoPlaces employs an attention-based BiLSTM model to detect user’s current trajectory, which is then used together with historical information stored in a prediction tree to infer user’s future places. We implemented GoPlaces in Android and evaluated it in several indoor spaces. The experimental results demonstrate prediction accuracy as high as 86%. Furthermore, they show GoPlaces is feasible in real life because it has low latency and low resource consumption on the phones.