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Accurate Trilateration for Passive RFID Localization in Smart Homes

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Abstract

The smart home as emerged in recent years as a new trend of research aiming to propose an alternative to postpone the institutionalization of cognitively-impaired people. These habitats are intended to provide security, guidance and direct support services to its resident. To fulfill this important mission, an algorithm first has to identify the ongoing activities of its user by tracking, in real time, the position of the main daily living objects. Many researchers addressed this issue by proposing systems based ultrasonic wave sensors, video cameras, and radio-frequency identification (RFID). However, the RFID technology, constitutes the most viable technology for smart homes. Recently, several RFID localization algorithms have been developed, mainly for commercial and industrial uses, but they are not precise enough to be used in an assistive context. Furthermore, the majority of them focuses on systems exploiting active RFID tags, which need batteries and are much more expensive. We present, in this paper, a new algorithmic approach for passive RFID localization in smart homes based on elliptical trilateration and fuzzy logic. This new algorithm has been implemented in a real smart home infrastructure. It has been rigorously tested and outperformed the comparable approaches.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Quebec Research Fund on Nature and Technologies and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. The authors would like to thank their health regional center for providing us the Alzheimer participants and their neuropsychologist partner and her graduate students who indirectly worked on this project by supervising the clinical trials with patients.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LIARA Laboratory, UQAC, Chicoutimi, QC, G7H 2B1, Canada

    Kevin Bouchard, Dany Fortin-Simard, Sebastien Gaboury, Bruno Bouchard & Abdenour Bouzouane

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  1. Kevin Bouchard
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  2. Dany Fortin-Simard
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  3. Sebastien Gaboury
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  4. Bruno Bouchard
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  5. Abdenour Bouzouane
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Correspondence to Kevin Bouchard.

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Bouchard, K., Fortin-Simard, D., Gaboury, S. et al. Accurate Trilateration for Passive RFID Localization in Smart Homes. Int J Wireless Inf Networks 21, 32–47 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-013-0234-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-013-0234-4

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