Forum Nokia Mobile Innovation Competition 2008 for Students

Innovation Winners Focus on Location Technologies

Teams from Denmark and Hungary, whose applications push the boundaries of location technology, have won the Forum Nokia Mobile Innovation Competition 2008 for University Students. With location-based services (LBS) at the leading edge of mobile development today, the two applications won over the contest’s panel of judges not just for their technical innovation but also for their commercial potential, backed by realistic business plans.

The teams were awarded 5,000 euros apiece, the opportunity to demonstrate their applications at the S60 Summit, and a Nokia N95 8 GB multimedia computer for each team member at the Forum Nokia Innovation Seminar. The two events were held in May 2008 in Barcelona, Spain.

Positioning without GPS

The CoopLoc application, from a student team at Denmark's Aalborg University, calculates a mobile device's geographical position without use of global positioning system (GPS) technology. Instead, it exploits the idea of a cooperative wireless network in which mobile devices share Cell ID and signal-strength information via Bluetooth connectivity. This approach enables device locations to be fixed with an accuracy that is about 20 percent better than without cooperation. CoopLoc is developed by Chiara Sammarco and Gian Paolo Perrucci.

"The application is based on an existing idea and took us about six months to implement, as we had to take many measurements," Perrucci says. "We developed the concept further by showing location using Google Maps rather than just displaying latitude and longitude in numbers. It was a step-by-step evolution."

Mobile navigation for the visually impaired

The other winning application, developed by students Bálint Tóth and Ákos Viktóriusz of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, combines GPS-based location with text-to-speech (TTS) software to provide practical voice-based navigation for blind and visually impaired people. The application, called NaviSpeech, uses synthesized speech to direct a user along a route by using named waypoints. The system enables the user to connect to a GPS receiver via Bluetooth communication.

"We are really hoping that the application will become a commercial product that can be used for navigation," says Viktóriusz. "Blind people need extra information in addition to that provided by a basic navigation system. For example, to navigate to a building, they must be told where the entrance to the building is. And when they use buses and trains, they need to know when they have arrived at their stop — they cannot just count the number of stops, as a bus may miss some stops. With this mobile navigation software, they know where they are."

Tóth and Viktóriusz are full of ideas for developing their application further. Among those ideas are creating algorithms and using acceleration and direction sensors to improve GPS accuracy, translating the application from Hungarian into other languages, and developing a facility to record routes for later use.

Both applications were demonstrated at the S60 Summit, where they attracted much attention from delegates across the mobile industry.

"We have made several good contacts with people interested in cooperating with us," said CoopLoc developer Sammarco at the end of the Summit. "Delegates have come up with some interesting new ideas for using CoopLoc on mobile phones — there has been real interest."

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