Application to determine location in home -- upstairs or downstairs

[paniwani]

I'd like to create an android application that can determine whether
you are upstairs or downstairs in a house. My advisor does not want us
to use GPS because he says it won't work well indoors. Instead, he
wants us to build the app using the accelerometer on the phone. Can
you offer any ideas on how I can go about doing this?

I thought at first I could obtain an acceleration vs. time graph and
then integrate twice to obtain displacement. If the displacement
reached a certain value, then you would know the user has traveled
either downstairs or upstairs. However, this seems really
computationally intensive and it requires the app be running for a
long period of time, so I doubt I could build the app using this
approach...

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[bob3695]

Well one idea would be if there are access points you can pull the signal strength (i dont know if you can) and find out that way...if the signal strength is different depending on the floor your on.

[droozen]

Originally Posted by bob3695

Well one idea would be if there are access points you can pull the signal strength (i dont know if you can) and find out that way...if the signal strength is different depending on the floor your on.

That seems pretty unreliable. (Someone might get better reception at locations downstairs, or the reception could be equal upstairs or downstairs or, heaven forbid, it might not have reception!)

GPS would be the way to go, but that, as mentioned, is probably unreliable, too, getting poor if any reception indoors.

I think the accelerometer is the way you want to go, like you've already said... I'm curious why you'd want an app for this? Sounds like some kind of spy app, where parents can keep track of their kids or something.

[Frito]

Its so he can know when ur in the shower upstairs.