High-Accuracy Localization for Assisted Living: 5G systems will turn multipath channels from foe to friend

TLDR

Assisted living technologies enabled by IoT are increasingly important, and accurate location information can support behavioral monitoring, fall detection, and real‑time assistance, offering older adults greater independence while reducing caretaking costs; however, conventional radio‑based indoor localization requires many fixed anchors, making widespread adoption unlikely due to high cost and installation complexity. This article explores high‑accuracy localization as a key component of assisted living, focusing on reducing infrastructure by exploiting reflected multipath components and demonstrating that knowledge of the propagation environment enables robust, accurate positioning. The authors discuss radiolocalization methods that leverage reflected multipath components and show that millimeter‑wave technology can use environmental knowledge to achieve centimeter‑level accuracy with minimal infrastructure. They demonstrate that millimeter‑wave 5G systems can provide centimeter‑accuracy indoor localization robustly, making them ideally suited for assisted living applications.

Abstract

Assisted living (AL) technologies, enabled by technical advances such as the advent of the Internet of Things, are increasingly gaining importance in our aging society. This article discusses the potential of future high-accuracy localization systems as a key component of AL applications. Accurate location information can be tremendously useful to realize, e.g., behavioral monitoring, fall detection, and real-time assistance. Such services are expected to provide older adults and people with disabilities with more independence and thus to reduce the cost of caretaking. Total cost of ownership and ease of installation are paramount to make sensor systems for AL viable. In case of a radio-based indoor localization system, this implies that a conventional solution is unlikely to gain widespread adoption because of its requirement to install multiple fixed nodes (anchors) in each room. This article therefore places its focus on 1) discussing radiolocalization methods that reduce the required infrastructure by exploiting information from reflected multipath components (MPCs) and 2) showing that knowledge about the propagation environment enables localization with high accuracy and robustness. It is demonstrated that new millimeter-wave (mm-wave) technology, under investigation for 5G communications systems, will be able to provide centimeter (cm)-accuracy indoor localization in a robust manner, ideally suited for AL.