Author: Support

iBeacon Driven Mobile Device Management for Education

Jamf School is a device management solution for education. It allows you to track devices and see their status. It uses iBeacon to allow subject learning material to be unlocked when students enter specific areas.

The Jamf web site has some useful content on using iBeacons in education:

Invisible Candles: Exploring IT Applications of iBeacons with Your JSS
Paul Cowan—IT Manager at the University of Waikato explains iBeacons, how they have evolved, how museums are using iBeacons to share information with visitors and how the Casper Suite can be used trigger events and gather proximity data.

iBeacons in Education
Video webinar on proximity-based technology and how it can be used to distribute and manage technologies in education environments. Covers privacy considerations, casper suite and jamf.

See the Light (and benefits) of iBeacon
Video on how Apple’s iBeacon technology works and when you would want to use it.

The benefits of iBeacons for education
Article on using iBeacons for device management and unlocking learning materials.

Jamf also has many more blog posts on using iBeacons in Education.

Owntracks Location Tracking and Alerting

Owntracks is an open source app for iOS and Android that allows you to keep track of your (or vulnerable family member’s) location. However, it also has business uses to track valuable assets. You can also build a private location diary and share it with others.

It works with iBeacons to provide:

  • Locating indoors where GPS doesn’t work
  • Attributing location to a vehicle to track time spent commuting or to see where you have parked your car
  • Fitting to keys/luggage/expensive equipment to get notified when you leave them behind

Latest Nordic Wireless Q Magazine Available

Nordic, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) in many beacons, has a latest issue of Wireless Q Magazine. It showcases the many uses of Nordic SoCs.

Read about:

  • The Ruuvi IoT asset tracker
  • Smart rope load sensors
  • Use of SoCs in an insulin monitor device
  • A wearable respiration monitor
  • Bluetooth 5.1 direction finding
  • Tracking shipping containers
  • IoT for farmers
  • Use of SoC for athlete performance wearable
  • Building next generation Bluetooth beacons

Inspecting Data from Bluetooth Gateways

Bluetooth gateways scan for beacons and send detected data your server, BeaconServer™ or BeaconRTLS™. However, what if you don’t have a server yet or want to determine if a gateway is actually sending data?

Ubeac allows you to set up a hook to receive gateway data. What’s more, they have some informative setup videos for our INGICS, Minew, AnkhMaway and Aprilbrother gateways.

Ubeac INGICS Setup

Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

View Bluetooth gateways

Using iBeacon to Assess Elderly Frailty

There’s a research paper by Thomas Tegou, Ilias Kalamaras, Markos Tsipouras, Nikolaos Giannakeas, Kostantinos Votis and Dimitrios Tzovaras of Information Technologies Institute, Greece on A Low-Cost Indoor Activity Monitoring System for Detecting Frailty in Older Adults.

The paper describes a room-level accuracy indoor localization system, based on Bluetooth RSSI, to assess the frailty in older people.

The implementation used smartphones as detectors:

The researchers identified features to classify degrees of movement between rooms:

The system was able to determine rooms to an accuracy above 93%. The results showed subjects with frailty had distinctive movement patterns that could be identified with high accuracy of 98%.

Read about Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Bluetooth Mesh Energy Consumption

There’s a new paper by Seyed Mahdi Darroudi, Raül Caldera-Sànchez and Carles Gomez of Department of Network Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya/Fundació, Spain on Bluetooth Mesh Energy Consumption: A Model.

They set up some experiments to measure current consumption under various parameters:

They found that a sensor device running on a simple 235 mAh battery, sending a data message every 10 secs, can achieve a lifetime of up to 15.6 months.

This battery is probably a CR2032 battery. Read our post on Beacon Battery Size, Type, Capacity and Life for typical beacons battery sizes and capacities.

Read about Beacons and the Bluetooth Mesh

iBeacons for Intuiface

Untuiface is one of a growing number of products incorporating beacons in their functionality. Untuiface allows you to build interactive multi-touch kiosk type screens without writing any code.

Intuiface Composer

It’s possible to use iBeacons to trigger actions. For a static kiosk, things or people coming close can trigger content. For a moving kiosk, such as a tablet, content can change depending on how close the tablet is to particular areas or things.

The settings provide for actions when beacon advertisements are detected, change or are lost thus providing for different types of interaction. Untuiface have an example to show contextual information as items are picked up from or replaced to their original position.

Read more about using iOS and Android Apps with Beacons

Industry 4.0 Platform

The February 2019 edition of ComputingEdge magazine from IEEE has an article on From Raw Data to Smart Manufacturing (pdf – current and back issues freely available).

The article describes what they call a ‘Semantic Web of Things for Industry 4.0 (SWeTI) platform’. Although it’s very useful, it’s less of a platform in the software sense and more of an ecosystem or model.

The platform describes usecases, tools and techniques for smart applications. Using this model, BeaconZone operates in the Device, Edge and Data Analytic layers. We provide for smart devices and tools, gateways, storage, machine learning (ML) and analytics.

Read about Benefits of Beacons

Read about Beacons in Industry and the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR)