Hotel Management has an article mentioning how hotel panic button solutions are being used by Curator Hotel & Resort Collection.
Employees wear a cellular wireless panic button that can be pressed when help is needed. Bluetooth beacons are placed around the hotel that allow the worker to be located.
There are other ways to implement such systems without needing expensive, extra, cellular wireless. For example, it’s possible to piggy back on phones employees are already carrying, use beacons with 2-way radio or have gateways around the hotel to detect location.
James Bayliss, a final year industrial design student at Loughborough University, has designed a smart mobility aid that uses beacons. It’s allows people with dementia to live safely in their own home for longer.
The system, called ‘AIDE’, comprises of a walking stick that works with Bluetooth beacons situated around the home.
It tracks the person’s movement and uses machine learning software to detect behaviours and actions that are out of the ordinary. The system also provides reminders to the person to help re-orient them if they have a confused episode.
There’s a recent paper by researchers at DeustoTech Institute of Technology, Bilbao, Spain and Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy on Behavior Modeling for a Beacon-Based Indoor Location System.
The research compares two different approaches to track a person indoors using Bluetooth LE technology with a smartphone and a smartwatch used as monitoring devices.
The beacons were iB005N supplied by us and it’s the first time we have been referenced in a research paper.
The research is novel in that it uses AI machine learning to attempt location prediction.
The researchers were able to predict the user’s next location with 67% accuracy.
Location prediction has some interesting and useful applications. For example, you might stop a vulnerable person going outside a defined area or in an industrial setting stop a worker going into a dangerous area.
We have a new specialist sensor beacon INGICS iBS03R in stock. It uses a time of flight (TOF) sensor to accurately detect distance to ±25mm over a range 40mm to 3m and 27 degree field of view.
It’s suitable for applications such as waste can, toilet paper, sanitiser, inventory monitoring and industrial automation.
Litum have a new article What is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)? How does BLE work? that’s higher level and less technical covering Bluetooth LE device discovery, differences to Classic Bluetooth, how positioning works, Bluetooth range , usecases and industries.
The University of North Carolina (UNC) recently piloted using beacons to track student-athlete class attendance.
SpotterEDU apps were used to detect beacons to implement automated attendance monitoring. This provided a replacement for previously ad-hoc and inconsistent manual checking.
The paper starts with an overview of indoor positioning techniques including trilateration, fingerprinting, dead reckoning and AI machine learning. It also provides a synposis of different technologies such as RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth.
The paper explains that while fingerprinting is widely used, it faces limitations when used in dynamically changing environments. Fingerprinting requires ongoing maintenance and updating of the reference fingerprinting map that’s manually intensive and time-consuming. Fingerprinting also requires a large number of beacon reference points to perform accurate locating.
The researchers looked into positioning within a two floor (grocery) retail store. Retail stores are of of the more challenging environments as there are shoppers moving about that can affect indoor localisation
Several indoor positioning techniques were considered including fingerprinting and trilateration. The researchers implemented fingerprinting and compared it to seven established classifiers. The random forest algorithm worked the best and inspired the authors to build an ensemble classification filter with lower absolute mean and root mean squared errors.
Mohari Hospitality and SH Hotels & Resorts have just opened the re-designed 1 Hotel Toronto as part of downtown Toronto’s urban regeneration.
1 Hotel Toronto
Beacons have been placed in the communal indoor and outdoor spaces as part of CNIB’s Accessible Neighbourhoods Project. The project improves access to city areas by making them more accessible.
Improving accessibility in Toronto
The BlindSquare Beacon Positioning System (BPS) broadcasts a unique ID that’s received by smartphones. The ID is used to look up the information linked to the beacon that’s presented to the user.
BPS App
There’s more detailed information on the BPS in the user guide.
You might have read that beacons can be used to pop up notifications. Such a mechanism, called Google Nearby Notifications, existed prior to October 2018 after which it was discontinued.
Today, there are two ways to cause beacons to trigger notifications:
Nordic Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) used in many beacons, has published the latest online issue of Wireless Quarter Magazine. It showcases the many uses of Nordic SoCs.
Highlights include:
Nordic Semiconductor has launched an Apple Find My network compatible SDK
A new Bluetooth device that could help vapers quit
A Bluetooth LE smart pen that monitors aesthetic levels during surgery
There’s an in-depth article ‘Evolving Intelligence’ that covers AI machine learning. It explains how bandwidth limitations, latency demands and privacy concerns are dictating that machine learning move from the Cloud to edge devices. Battery powered IoT modules are able to perform machine learning inference in real-time allowing decision making near to where sensor data is generated and used.
