位置通信

A fire-fighter can pretty easily get lost and disorientated when surrounded by smoke in the middle of the night. GPS navigation is great, but not for working inside buildings because of the absence of line of sight to satellites, while cellular positioning methods generally fail to provide a satisfactory degree of accuracy. In most countries mobile users are the majority callers for emergency response. It's obvious that most people spend most of their time indoors, and the majority of location-based services are actually being initiated indoors or in environments where GPS fails to deliver acceptable end-user performance. Conventional GPS receivers do not work inside buildings, so that the majority of the world's commerce and social interaction is conducted indoors and thus unable to take advantage of outdoor positioning systems like GPS. The delivered position fixes cannot even be used for determining whether a target person stays inside or outside a certain building, not to mention the barrier to location represented by granularity of rooms or floors.

Over the past decade these difficulties have been resolved by advances in location positioning technology. These GPS-complementary technologies are now being introduced to the market as hybrid solutions: GPS + Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) + RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification). Hybrid solutions enable many kinds of indoor location-aware application. Outside the remit of 2G, 2.5G, 3G and 4G cellular networks there exist other families of positioning technologies often referred to as ‘local positioning' which utilise short-range networks such as WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID, ultrasound, UWB (Ultra-WideBand) or TV radio signals.

最终解决方案理想地应用于所有现有设备并利用现有通信基础架构。这将避免对受害者和救援单位的需求配备特殊设备。此外，该解决方案最好不需要下载，注册，登录或密码。因此，受害者可以立即获得紧急疏散路线。这种解决方案的示例来自ZOS通信，其提供了一种位置通信实用程序，其使任何移动电话能够在紧急情况下接收疏散方向。可以使用GPS，A-GPS，Cell Towers或Wi-Fi节点或用户回复SMS文本消息来建立利用本机设备功能或基于网络的位置。SMS，电子邮件或本机应用程序可用于即时通信，从而导致每个移动用户通知。