At IndoorAtlas, we’ve received numerous requests on how to track, for example, employees, to automate workplace services — or patients, to provide them with more efficient and stress-free care.

The most common IndoorAtlas use case thus far has been Wayfinding from the user’s current location to a destination, with the user’s own smartphone. This is enabled by Fingerprinting a venue with IndoorAtlas MapCreator and integrating IndoorAtlas SDK to an app that runs on the user’s smartphone. This is convenient as the user can use her/his own device.

However, in many use cases the location coordinates of the people are needed only in the backend systems and smartphone is not always convenient to use. In such use cases smartwatches might work better.

Wear OS is an operating system for Smartwatches created by Google. It’s based on Android and supports many of the same features and APIs as Android on smartphones — perhaps unsurprisingly also IndoorAtlas Android SDK runs on Wear OS with no changes at all!

The video below shows a very minimal effort demo of using IndoorAtlas on a Ticwatch E. In the video, IndoorAtlas full sensor fusion stack is run on the smartwatch together with a user interface that shows the user’s position on the smartwatch screen. Moreover, the demo utilizes an existing IndoorAtlas SDK example to push the location of the smartwatch to PubNub, allowing the smartphone to subscribe and display the watch locations.

Using the full sensor fusion stack on the smartwatch leads to similar accuracy as running IndoorAtlas SDK on a smartphone.  Note that this may work for some use cases, whereas for other use cases, it would be more important to minimize the battery consumption. A simple measure is the use of low power mode of the IndoorAtlas SDK. Similarly, using the Positioning REST API with a suitably low update frequency reduces battery consumption.

We are eagerly waiting to see the first IndoorAtlas deployment with positioning on all of Smartphones, PCs, Smartwatches, and IOT devices. Note that all of these are enabled with the same fingerprinting workflow!