This project is done as part of the Google Summer of Code 2017 program. The basic idea of this project is to build a solution with which users can easily navigate inside hospitals using an application in his/her smartphone/tablet/laptop. The application will show the indoor map of the hospital with the position of the user highlighted and updated as he/she move within the building. This solution does not require GPS but uses Physical Web beacons for positioning.

Bluetooth Low Energy based beacons which advertises URLs which can be scanned by nearby devices.

A JavaScript API available as part of the Chrome Browser which lets users to directly interact with BLE beacons nearby.

API provided by Google to programmatically render maps as well as to interact with maps.

An indoor tagging schema for indoor mapping.

An open standard for representing geographical features in JSON format along with their non-spatial attributes (tags).

Framework for building interactive single page web applications.

This solution contains three components:

• Indoor Navigator
  • Provides indoor map of a building with ability to switch between levels (floors). Also, lets used to find their current location by highlighting the nearest feature (room, corridor, etc) based on the proximity of the Physical Web Beacon.
• Indoor Map Creator
  • Provides a DIY based GUI to build indoor maps of buildings with multiple floors. Provides option to attach a Physical Web Beacon reference number to all features to enable beacon based navigation.
• Indoor Map Creator API
  • REST API to be consumed by the Indoor Map Creator to persist the data as well as the Indoor Navigator to consume GeoJSON

Worklogs and documents are available here.

• Physical Web Official Page: http://physical-web-project.github.io/
• Video Recording of Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppM_sJMJl8M

MIT © Vipin Raj