Automated Detection of Burned-Out Luminaries Using Indoor Positioning

Mobile participatory sensing (MPS), a paradigm that utilizes pervasive mobile devices to efficiently collect data, has gained much interest in a variety of applications in outdoor spaces. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of MPS in indoor environments through one specific application - burned-out luminary detection. To mitigate the inherent inaccuracy of indoor positioning systems (IPS), we devise a Dynamic Time Warping-based approach and leverage majority votes across multiple runs of measurements. Experimental study using data collected from off-the-shelf smartphones and a basic IPS shows that the proposed approach can indeed detect the presence of burnout luminaries with high accuracy, and can significantly outperform a baseline method. Interestingly, we also demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can be leveraged to improve an existing luminary-assisted solution, and thus leads to zero-configuration and robust IPS.