Localino T-shirt: The Real-time Indoor Localization in Ambient Assisted Living Applications

In the last decade, smart textiles have become very popular as a concept and have found use in many applications, such as military, electronics, automotive, and medical ones. In the medical area, smart textiles research is focused more on biomonitoring, telemedicine, rehabilitation, sport medicine or home healthcare systems.In this research, the development and localization accuracy measurements of a smart T-shirt are presented, which will be used by elderly people for indoor localization in ambient assisted living applications. The proposed smart T-shirt and the work presented is considered to be applicable in cases of elderly, toddlers or even adults in indoor environments where their continuous real-time localization is critical. This smart T-shirt integrates a localization sensor, namely the Localino sensor, together with a solar panel for energy harvesting when the user is moving outdoors, as well as a battery/power bank that is both connected to the solar panel and the Localino sensor for charging and power supply respectively. Moreover, a mock-up house was deployed, where the Localino platform anchors were deployed at strategic points within the house area. Localino sensor nodes were installed in all the house rooms, from which we obtained the localization accuracy measurements. Furthermore, the localization accuracy was also measured for a selected number of mobile user scenarios, in order to assess the platform accuracy in both static and mobile user cases.Details about the implementation of the T-shirt, the selection and integration of the electronics parts, and the mock-up house, as well as about the localization accuracy measurements results are presented in the paper.