Real-World Indoor Location Assessment with Unmodified RFID Antennas

Pedro Sobral, Rui Santos, Ricardo Alexandre, Pedro Marques, Mário Antunes, João Paulo Barraca, João Silva, Nuno Ferreira

Abstract: The management of health systems has been one of the main challenges in several countries, especially where the aging population is increasing. This led to the adoption of smarter technologies as means to automate, and optimize processes within hospitals. One of the technologies adopted is active location tracking, which allows the staff within the hospital to quickly locate any sort of entity, from key persons to patients or equipment. In this work, we focus on exploring ML models to develop a reliable method for active indoor location tracking based on off the shelf RFID antennas with UHF passive tags. The presented work describes the full development of the solution, from the initial development made within a controlled environment, to the final evaluation made on a real health clinic. The proposed solution was able to achieved 0.47 m on average on a complex medical environment, with unmodified hardware.