Use of magnetic positioning systems in industrial and biomedical applications

Nowadays the ability to locate people and objects is becoming an important and necessary aspect for the wide range of applications concerning localization-based services. Indeed, applications based on spatial and time awareness of people and objects within certain contexts are being developed. Some application examples in which the positioning problem must be considered and solved are: industrial automation, virtual reality, smart cities, smart health, robot navigation and remote surgery. Although in outdoor environments this does not represent a big issue thanks to the presence and support of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs), there is a whole series of scenarios, such as indoors, underground, and underwater environments, in which GNSSs fail due to the complexity of the considered environments with respect to radio propagation. Nowadays, in the considered scenarios, the identification of a reliable method able to satisfy the positioning requirements is an open issue, for which the measurement community can provide a valuable contribution regarding the proposal of measurement methods and procedures, the evaluation of the major causes of uncertainty of the devices and the consideration of these features within positioning algorithms and data processing.