Amazon (Murtuza Attarwala): Would recommend this book to anyone who is actively working with Location Based Services, or is planning on working with Location Based Services. The initial sections of the book gives comprehensive use cases, where location based services are/can be used. The author then goes into the details of different technologies that are out there in the market that can be used to implement these services. For each technology, the author first describes the technology and then discusses the pros/cons of using that technology to implement the solution. These gives a very good idea, of what technology should be used from the cost/technical perspective for a particular solution. For e.g. what is the expected responsiveness of RTLS for your particular solution, what is the accuracy that you desire, is it room-level or is zone-level good enough, how big a tag is acceptable for your solution, what is the expected battery life of the tag. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Location based services.

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Tracking location is challenging due to the numerous constraints of practical systems including, but not limited to, global cost, device volume and weight, scalability and accuracy; these constraints are typically more severe for systems that should be wearable and used indoors. We investigate the use of wearable solar cells to track changing light conditions (a concept that we named LuxTrace) as a source of user displacement and activity data. We evaluate constraints of this approach and present results from an experimental validation of displacement and activity estimation. The results indicate that a distance estimation accuracy of 21 cm (80% quantile) can be achieved. A simple method to combine LuxTrace with complementary absolute location estimation methods is also presented. We apply carpet-like distributed RFID tags to demonstrate online learning of new lighting environments.

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