Traceme — indoor real-time location system

Localization of persons and objects is a current need of many industrial applications. Although in outdoor environments GPS or the cell-of-origin technique can have good results, they are very limited in indoor environments. In indoor environments other technologies such as RFID have a better performance. We propose an RFID based system, called TraceMe, to be used in real-time indoor localization. Besides localization it also enables area access control of people and objects, is able of alarm generation due to communications failure, access violation or tag violation, and is responsible for the interoperability of the deployed equipment. System specification, implementation, field tests and analysis of results are presented in this paper. As any traditional RFID system, it is constituted by Readers and Tags. The used tags are active and have the particularity of using two different communications frequencies. Besides the hardware also a Java-based middleware was developed. It is responsible to give meaning to data and to coordinate communications between all architecture elements. Final tests to the prototype were made in a public hospital.