The Journal of Physics has new research into a Student Attendance Manager Using Beacons and Deep Learning (pdf).
The system automatically registers attendance without disturbing the class. It uses an iBeacon in each classroom to determine location. It also uses a camera and deep learning analysis to prevent students cheating the system by having someone else attend. The researchers say the system is better than biometric scanning and RFID that requires manual reading one by one.
The solution uses iBeacons but it’s the Bluetooth MAC address that’s used for room identification. The scanner and camera interface uses a Raspberry Pi that sends data to a server.
Google stopped serving Android Nearby Notifications late in 2018 but kept the Nearby API working for use within apps. Google has now deprecated the Nearby API that allows you to associate beacon ids with arbitrary content such as a link or multimedia data. It will be shut down on April 1, 2021.
No, it’s not an April fool joke but instead another useful thing killed by Google. Apart from Search, Cloud, Gmail and perhaps Android it’s risky to base your business on anything provided by Google. Unless it’s an offering through which Google itself depends for income then you can’t depend on it sticking around. Instead, businesses should look to create their own APIs.
This shows the easy route isn’t always the best route. Think about your project dependencies. It is likely the platform you depend on will exist for the lifetime of your project? How is the platform funded? How is the company that provides the platform funded?
Tracker beacons are different from normal beacons in that they are designed to be connected to an app for the majority of the time. Non-tracker beacons just advertise and aren’t usually connected except for setup.
The F6 comes with iOS and Android SDKs that provide for bonding/pairing with a password, listening to events such as connecting, connected, disconnected, getting the MAC address and RSSI, ringing the tracker, receiving a button press event, receiving a notification n seconds after disconnect and disconnecting at a given distance (received signal power level, RSSI).
Sensor beacons provide a quick and easy way to obtain data for AI machine learning. They provide a way of measuring physical processes to provide for detection and prediction.
Beacon Temperature Sensor
Beacons detect movement (accelerometer), movement (started/stopped moving), button press, temperature, humidity, air pressure, light level, open/closed (magnetic hall effect), proximity (PIR), proximity (cm range), fall detection, smoke and natural gas. The open/closed (magnetic hall effect) is particularly useful as it can be used on a multitude of physical things for scenarios that require digitising counts, presence and physical status.
The data is sent via Bluetooth rather than via cables which means there’s no soldering or physical construction. The Bluetooth data can be read by smartphones, gateways or any devices that have Bluetooth LE. From there it can be stored in files for reading into machine learning.
Such data is often complex and it’s difficult for a human to devise a conventional programming algorithm to extract insights. This is where AI machine learning excels. In simple terms, it reads in recorded data to find patterns in the data. The result of this learning is a model. The model is then used during inference to classify or predict situations based on new incoming data.
The above shows some output from accelerometer data fed into one of our models. The numbers are distinct features found over the time series as opposed to a single x,y,z sample. For example ’54’ might be a peak and ’61’ a trough. More complex features are also detectable such as ‘120’ being the movement of the acceleration sensor in a circle. This is the basis for machine learning classification and detection.
It’s also possible to perform prediction. Performing additional machine learning (yes, machine learning on machine learning!) on the features to produce a new model tells us what usually happens after what. When we feed in new data to this model we can predict what is about to happen.
The problem with sensor data is there can be a lot of it. It’s inefficient and slow to detect events when this processing at the server. We create so called Edge solutions that do this processing closer to the place of detection.
We have a new rugged, UV-resistant, waterproof (IP68) sensor beacon, the AC-BLE-T110G in stock.
This is the first beacon we know of that supports Bluetooth 5 Long Range Coded PHY. While many beacons mention Bluetooth 5 in their specification and a Bluetooth 5 SDK has been used in their development, they only transmit Bluetooth 4.2 advertising. This beacon is the first to support Bluetooth 5 Long Range Coded PHY to achieve a range up to 200m with compatible gateways and smartphones.
Advertising modes
This beacon can also be set to detect motion with a user defined threshold (mg) and duration (ms) which sends an alternative iBeacon id, a configurable number of times, instead of normal advertising.
There are lots of ways of processing Bluetooth signal strength (RSSI) to determine location. Being based on radio, RSSI suffers from fluctuations, over time, even when the sender and receiver don’t move.
Trilateration and fingerprinting are common techniques to improve location accuracy based on RSSI. The paper improves on these by using analysis based on Kalman filtering of segments delimited by turns. This is used to derive locations based on pedestrian dead reckoning.
The researchers achieved a positioning accuracy of 2.75m.
When connecting to Bluetooth devices such as beacons via GATT, APIs are used to connect to specific Bluetooth Services and Bluetooth Characteristics. Services and Characteristics are identified by 128-bit UUID values written as 00000000-0000-1000-0000-000000000000 where each digit is a hexadecimal number. For example, an app might connect to a Service with id D35B1000-E01C-9FAC-BA8D-7CE20BDBA0C6 and then read and write to a Characteristic with id D35B1001-E01C-9FAC-BA8D-7CE20BDBA0C6.
In practice, an interface usually uses similar UUIDs that only change in the xxxx part of the UUID: D35Bxxxx-E01C-9FAC-BA8D-7CE20BDBA0C6. There’s usually a base UUID such as D35B0000-E01C-9FAC-BA8D-7CE20BDBA0C6 and only 16-bits values are provided in the interface documented description.
Here’s an example from the Meeblue beacon documentation:
The Meeblue base UUID is D35B0000-E01C-9FAC-BA8D-7CE20BDBA0C6. When it’s said the UUID is 0x1000, the actual UUID is D35B1000-E01C-9FAC-BA8D-7CE20BDBA0C6.
When we started BeaconZone, our aim was to encourage new scenarios beyond the over-hyped and under-successful retail marketing scenarios.
One of the issues with retail marketing with beacons is that it requires opt-in through the installation of an app. This is a large barrier if you are considering users who are ambivalent about using specific apps and beacons. The only way it’s usually viable is if you are a large brand who already has an app on customers’ smartphones.
The more interesting and successful uses of beacons involve scenarios that are ‘want-in’ or B2B rather thanconsumer ‘opt-in’. Here are just a few examples of where our beacons are being used:
Policing. There’s a move to what’s called evidence-based policing requiring proof of which police have visited which locations. Trials are taking place to replace paper based reporting with beacon-based automation.
Tours. Beacons have been purchased for use on guided walks and with museum information kiosks.
The Elderly. Several of our our customers are using beacons to keep track of elderly people in care homes and hospitals.
Smart Offices. Several of our customers are using beacons to enable the whereabouts of workers and equipment in smart offices including read time monitoring of room occupancy. We also have clients using beacons with checkin/out type applications.
Asset Tracking. We have two large-instrument manufacturer are using beacons for tracking assets. We also have a customer using beacons and gateways to track bicycles. Our beacons are also being used extensively at many sites that track location using Motorola TRBOnet two-way radio.
Events. Our long range beacons are being used outside for tracking BMX bike trials and power efficient beacons inside large arena events.
Gaming. Ingress players use our beacons.
Automotive. A large UK car manufacturer is using our beacons. Another customer, an undertaker, is using beacons with a car driving monitor app to log the time spent driving.
Security. Our beacons are being used in security systems at several sites including lone worker SOS scenarios.
Utilities. One of the largest UK water authorities is investigating the use of sensor beacons.
Insurance. We have customers using beacons for in-car presence detection.
Health. Our beacons are being used in apps/systems that help visibly impaired people find their way around buildings. Sensor beacons are being used in hospitals to monitor the temperature of refrigerated medicines.
Research. Our beacons have also been purchased by Google, Mozilla and many UK universities for use on their research projects.
Beacons have a multitude of further real uses waiting to be explored and exploited.
Most use of Bluetooth LE and beacons only looks at the transmitted advertising containing identification and sensor information. More advanced use requires connection to the device using GATT to write, read and be notified of changes in values (Bluetooth Service Characteristics). The most common use for connecting is to set configurable settings as in the case of device manufacturer smartphone apps.
Some solutions need to manipulate Bluetooth Service Characteristics programmatically. Barry Byford has a new Pyton library BLE-GATT for Linux based devices. It’s based on the BlueZ D-Bus API, features a small number of dependencies and can be easily installed without sudo privileges.
We recently came across TracerPlus, a system that allows you to scan and collect Eddystone and iBeacon data into forms on iOS and Android.
A desktop application builder is used to design the forms:
The system can be used to efficiently take inventory and capture additional data from beacons for example, unique identifiers for items, battery life, temperature and URL information.
TracerPlus provides semi-custom mobile applications at a fraction of the cost of custom software.
