Usability Study of Indoor Mobile Navigation System in Commercial Facilities

In this paper, we describe a field experiment of an autonomous mobile system to navigate users and to estimate the self-position indoors, where it is impossible to receive a GPS signal. Many users utilize positional information systems of GPS. However, because positional information computed using GPS signal is available only in the locations with satellite signal reception, it is difficult to use GPS for positioning in indoor environments. Therefore, we have developed an indoor navigation system to provide ubiquitous information service like that of a portable navigation system that can be used inside commercial and office buildings. The navigation system can display user’s position that is estimated by beacon signal using license-free radios. We carried out a field experiments in large-scale commercial facilities to evaluate the usability of the navigation interface and availability of the indoor navigation service on a smart phone. As a result, we found that the users would like to have some functions of indoor navigation systems. Author