An Indoor Location-Based Social Network for Managing Office Resource and Connecting People

With growing popularity of social networks, people´s locations are being used for providing rich mobile social services, mostly with outdoor positioning using GPS. We present a mobile social service deployed in an indoor office environment called “Nokia Find & Connect” (NF&C). In NF&C, employees´ locations are tracked using Wi-Fi to efficiently find, reserve and manage office resources like meeting rooms and desks and to easily connect other colleagues through scheduled interactions like having a meeting together and/or unscheduled yet implicit interactions like ephemeral encounters between two people. We present the user interface and functional architecture of NF&C and discuss a user study that we conducted in our office.