MazeMap
Interactive Indoor Maps for Large Establishments

When you visited your university campus for the first time, who guided you to the library, cafeteria, or classroom? Fellow students, teachers, or the signboards giving directions? We all face difficulties in finding our ways in huge establishments such as educational institutions and hospitals as they often look like a maze where getting out is difficult. And when stuck in such establishments, we look for assistance to reach our destination. MazeMap—a global company—provides the assistance required in such circumstances in the form of indoor maps. The company has created indoor maps and an easy-to-use wayfinding platform specially designed for complexes such as universities, hospitals, conference venues, offices and hotels. The company’s searchable, linkable, user-friendly, and always up-to-date map platform was developed as an outcome of the CEO, Thomas Jelle’s endeavor to enhance the student experience in university campuses during his previous job. Jelle thereafter decided to form a company to improve the experience of new students arriving at the university—a move that marked the beginning of MazeMap in 2011.

Jelle initially observed the students for a week, noting their footfall in the university to discover the problems they face in the campus, and wayfinding was one of them. Back then, very few companies existed in the indoor maps and wayfinding domain, and even the ones operating in the segment were dependent on hand-drawn maps, which involved a tremendous amount of manual efforts. “We instead automated the process of creating indoor maps by utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which is one of our core strengths today,” asserts Jelle. MazeMap started its journey of delivering a mapping platform and acquired its first client—a university with 60 buildings and about 13,000 rooms spread across 3.5 million square feet.

Ever since, universities have been the biggest client segment for MazeMap in front of hospitals, corporate offices, hotels, and conference venues. Similar to university students, patients, hospital staff, and corporate employees also struggle with wayfinding, and MazeMap assists them in reaching their destinations with the help of its indoor maps.

A User-friendly Indoor Map

The MazeMap indoor maps and wayfinding platform’s user-friendliness proves to be its biggest advantage. The solution can be easily integrated into any mobile device or third-party systems using the company’s web-based application programming interface (API). Many of the firm’s customers use the platform through a third-party app interface; however, it can also be used on iOS and Android devices. The platform comprises APIs such as JavaScript, HTTP, and URL that empower the developers to build their own solutions, thus giving them more control over the maps.

Last year, MazeMap released the first public version of its new JavaScript API 2.0 that employs a map engine specifically for the developers. Built using a high-performance WebGL, this new API delivers a great user experience for the developers, allowing them to create their own applications.

The user would invite to the meeting in the same way as before e.g. with Outlook and links will be automatically added once the invite is sent. Also, university students can use the timetable and with just a click from the timetable get shown where the next lecture is, “It’s all about giving relevant information whenever necessary. Integrating links into solutions where location is relevant is the key” says Jelle. For integration with indoor positioning solution, MazeMap seeks assistance from partners. The largest partner would be Cisco. So, MazeMap works with Cisco and to utilize existing WiFi networks to obtain indoor positioning.

Numerous Possibilities Associated with Indoor Maps

Akin to universities, the MazeMap interactive indoor maps are employed by a multitude of hospitals across three continents. On any given day, these hospitals have thousands of patients and visitors along with several employees within their premises who struggle with wayfinding. MazeMap assists all such visitors with its easy-to-use indoor maps. A newly built hospital gained significant benefits from MazeMap’s solution as it had many patients visiting the hospital premises before their scheduled appointment to avoid any possibilities of missing it. The hospital also witnessed that many of the patients were missing or delaying the appointments due to poor wayfinding at the hospital. At St. Olavs University Hospital 2.9 percent of all appointments, where missed a couple of years back. The hospital then started using MazeMap, equipping patients with the map platform,and witnessed a reduction of 30 percent in missed appointments. This tremendous fall in the number of missed appointments saved them about $2M annually. During the night, not many staff members are present at the hospital,.Whenever the alarm goes off, the map pops up on the employees’ mobile phones, directing them to reach their destination including the best route to run. According to the hospital the reaction time is reduced and this actually helps saving lives. The hospital also wanted to track its assets such as wheelchairs, and medical equipment. Using the MazeMap platform, the hospital was able to locate such physical objects.

At most of the reception desks in hospitals, about 80 percent of the questions asked are about directions and wayfinding. The hospital had 11 people sitting at different reception desks, and wanted people to have self-service in finding their way. MazeMap reduced the staff, replaced the reception desks with kiosks, and allocated the saved money for treating patients with better care.

Going forward, MazeMap aims to enable the customers in reaping benefits of their investments directed at advancing the mapping platform. The company caters to a large client base across 25 countries with the vision of fulfilling their needs efficiently. “At MazeMap we try to live by the user driven innovation approach. That means that we are trying to listen to our customers, partners and users, understand challenges they are having. This way we focus on new features that bring more value to our customers and higher Return on investment. One of the challenges we are working on now is to be able to give users a better overview of available meeting rooms and increase the utilization of them. This is reported a big problem across many of our customers with miss utilization causing losses of several 100,000 USD yearly.