Real-Time Wireless Location and Tracking System with Motion Pattern Detection (2010)

This section is dedicated to present and specify the project's main conclusions as well as identify and further detail major future work areas and potential collateral applications. Admitting the first topic and having the conjunction between the project's module description, section 3, and its main results in the above section, one ought to affirm that all the most important goals were fully accomplished. In order to further support this statement, a brief hypothesis/result comparison shall be undertaken in the next few paragraphs. First, a fully functional item real-time location and tracking system was pursued ­ without strict error-free requirements. The Wi-Fi based solution, not only complied to the specifications ­ real-time issues and non-critical error margin: less than 3 meters as maximum error ­ but did it reusing most of the client's network infrastructure (in the retail case) or using low brand equipments- router and access points (in soccer case). With this inexpensive tracking solution any team's coach has detailed reports about the performance of a specific player or the all team in a training session or even in a soccer mach. The possibility of having real time player positions in a specific situation and historical player paths constitutes an important tactical indicator for any soccer coach. Secondly, the designed system's architecture proved to be reliable, efficient and, perhaps, most important, flexible enough to contemplate vast and diverse application scenarios. Also within this scope the distributed communication architecture performed as predicted enabling computation across distinct machines, therefore improving overall performance and reliability. This feature also enabled simultaneous multi-terminal access, both to the real-time analysis tool and the historical statistical software. Taking into consideration the project's tools ­ real-time and historical ­ both were classified, by the retail company's end-users ­ mainly shop managers, marketing directors and board administrators and for sport experts - mainly clubs directors and academic experts ­ as extremely useful and allowed swift knowledge extraction, preventing them the excruciating, and not often useless ­ process of getting through massive indirect location data. The immediate visual information provided by the system proved to be effective in direct applications such as queue management and hot and cold zones identification, and most significant, in what concerns to visit's idiosyncrasy pattern extraction ­ as duration, distance and layout distribution ­ across different time dimensions, thus enhancing marketing and logistic decisions' impact. Also, in the sports area this system constitutes an important tool for measurement athletes' performance all over a training session. Finally, in what concerns to direct results' analysis, one must refer to Oracle's APEX technology adoption. It has demonstrated to be able to allow multiple simultaneous accesses and, consequently, dramatically enhancing analysis empowerment, while, at the same time, eliminated heavy data computation from end-users terminals, concentrating it in controlled and expansible clusters. This characteristic allows through its web-based interface, accesses from unconventional systems such as PDAs, smartphones and not only notebooks and desktop computers. This particular feature is of great importance for on floor analysis and