The unprecedented development in the realm of Internet of Things in recent times has facilitated the adoption and integration of microcontrollers and sensors into a large variety of contexts and at a significant scale. Among the multitude of concepts that derive from this paradigm, a topic that recently grabbed both industry and academic interest is the indoor location, a field where dynamic challenges are currently tackled in order to enhance existing emergency evacuation systems, behavioural based recommendation engines and improve indoor assistants for optimized path finding and accurate guidance

Latest technological advancement uncovered new social and entrepreneurial opportunities in fields like civil engineering and facility management. While most outdoor location challenges have been addressed in the past few years, with declassified military technologies such as Motion Imagery Standards Board and North Atlantic Treaty Organization Digital Motion Imagery Standard being integrated into solutions that enhance real-time emulation of surveillance video streams over digital maps, there is plenty of room for innovation when indoor location is considered. The market associated to indoor positioning is expected to significantly grow in the following decade since people spend more and more time indoors and promising advantages of such technologies have been identified in healthcare, retail, logistics and leisure. Yet, conventional indoor positioning systems mostly rely on costly and difficult to maintain infrastructure. Discordantly, the hereby paper is introducing an infrastructure free indoor positioning web application designed for routing people inside facilities and building evacuation scenarios. The proposed architecture is independent on external hardware or beacons, relying on a generic sensors framework that exposes the underlying capabilities of a mobile phone for data collection and internet connection for assessing current location and providing guidance in respect with an already known topography. Therefore, this design might be easily extended to various facilities, individualizing through no initial costs for sensors deployment and light resource consumption for the user, since data is not processed on a native application. Such flexibility is considered to optimize the navigation inside large public places and reduce the time required to find products, people or shops, offering the users more time for what matters.

This paper is providing an in-detail analysis of existing mobile based software solutions for indoor localization and identifies several issues to be tackled. The objective this research initiative is assuming is to provide an alternative approach for traditional sensorbased applications, an alternative that behaves better in terms of resource consumption, maintenance costs and degree of generality. The principles hereby described have been integrated into a web application that has been tested in two different environments, providing indoor localization accuracy under a meter

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Romania's capital city is one of the most endangered cities in Europe due to its proximity to the Vrancea seismic region. Over the years both authorities and researchers have tried to understand the root causes, implement monitoring systems and mitigate risks. So far, the efforts were concentrated on estimations and pre-disaster solutions that can limit the impact. In contrast, modern technologies provide stakeholders the opportunity to develop relevant post-disaster decision support systems that facilitate reaction after an incident. Indoor location systems have multiple applications in emergency mitigation context, the current paper detailing the building evacuation scenario. A software solution that relies on smartphone capabilities to determine the shortest evacuation route is further introduced. The application provides convenient workarounds for known technological limitations, grants high accuracy and avoids the costs of traditional sensors-based indoor location systems. Nevertheless, this solution is tailored to the user, instead of the rescue teams, which to the best of our knowledge is the first academic initiative of its kind in Romania.