Location – Page 7 – BeaconZone Blog

Occupancy Detection Using BLE Beacons

The Covid pandemic has resulted in many organisations looking to quantify occupancy. This is especially so in education where government guidelines tend to be based on occupancy as well as social distancing.

Occupancy isn’t just relevant to pandemics. It’s also a factor in, for example, building emergency management when determining the optimal plan of action, for example, when allocating emergency personnel. Similar situations exist in police and military settings where, additionally, it’s advantageous to know the real time location of assets, people and casualties.

Past research on Occupancy Detection for Building Emergency Management Using BLE Beacons investigated use of a system made up of Bluetooth beacons installed in rooms and an app installed on occupants’ smartphones.

The research system used Raspberry Pis as iBeacons and Android phones as Bluetooth detectors. Fingerprinting was used to to produce data that fed into a multi-class SVM classification with classes being different room areas. The system was able to provide high occupancy accuracy and identify occupant movement patterns.

There are many problems with using such a system in real life. The Raspberry Pi beacons are fragile and have long term reliability problems due to the use of Micro SD storage. Systems based on fingerprinting rarely work long term because wireless signals change when there are changes in the physical environment such as more people or change in furniture. Using smartphones as detectors also isn’t always reliable because people fiddle with apps, change permissions and real time use implies a larger battery drain.

Instead, it’s necessary to turn the system around and have beacons on people and use dedicated devices, gateways, as detectors. In the simplest case, the gateways send detections to a server to be processed. More sophisticated systems such as our BeaconRTLS™ provide intelligent processing, mapping, alerts and reporting such as occupancy per zone.

Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)

iBeacon RSSI Anomaly Detection for Indoor Positioning

There’s new research on iBeacon Indoor Positioning Method Combined with Real-Time Anomaly Rate to Determine Weight Matrix that uses a weighted Levenberg-Marquadt (LM) algorithm to determine the location of ibeacons.

The solution processes the received signal strength (RSSI) to determine anomaly rates of beacons and hence filter out abnormal signals. This helps to overcome the problems of unreliable signal strength in indoor locations due to reflections and obstacles.

The system achieves an average positioning error of 1.5m.

Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)

Bluetooth Asset Tracking

Bluetooth tags/beacons detect the position of people and assets. Software maps jobs, valuable tools, parts, sub-assemblies and people onto your floor plans or maps.

The main uses are:

Searching. Knowing the location of something such as a piece of equipment, parts, stock, pallets, a job or person without ringing round. Locating expensive, shared, equipment so fewer spare assets are required to cover an area.
Security. Alerting when people or assets enter or leave an area.
Protection. Detecting quantities such as temperature and humidity for sensitive items that can spoil.
Process Control. Knowing where things have been. Knowing what happened at a particular location. Knowing when measured values exceeded their expected range.

Bluetooth LE is particularly suitable because it is:

Real Time. Better than barcode scans and NFC tags where the data is only as up to date as the last successful manual scan.
Compatible. Bluetooth LE works with existing devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops.
Reliable. Works in electrically noisy situations such as the factory.
Inexpensive. Commodity hardware is more affordable than non-standard technologies such as ultra wideband (UWB).

The end result is reduced downtime, less time re-ordering or re-making things that have been lost, optimum productivity and better use of skilled staff doing their job rather than searching for assets and people.

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

Learn about Asset and Pallet Tracking for Manufacturers

Discover BeaconRTLS™

Read about BluetoothLocationEngine™

Why Real Time Locating is Becoming More Popular

The recent Nordic Semiconductor wireless quarter magazine contained an article on positioning and real time locating systems (RTLS). RTLS is experiencing growth:

RTLS detects the position of people and assets in real time. Tags are attached to people or assets and the radio signals from the tag allow the location to be determined. The real time aspect is important because it provides the current position automatically, unlike barcode scans and and NRF tags that are only as up to date as the last successful scan. With older, manual, systems, people are lazy and forget to scan.

A complete RTLS system comprises of readers, tag/sensors, application software and communications/network infrastructure.

Asset tracking is being used in industry verticals such as healthcare, defence, education and manufacturing. It commonly tracks tools, equipment, pallets, sub-assemblies, jobs and completed goods.

People tracking has tended to be used more in education and health where the security of individuals is more important than privacy concerns related to tracking people.

RTLS growth is being driven by the benefit of real time tracking allowing processes to be much more efficient. Effort and time is saved when things and people can be found quickly. Alerts notify abnormal conditions to provide for proactive actions. Reports track long term trends to allow identification of patterns that can be used to change processes to improve efficiency.

Bluetooth is popular for use with RTLS because tags and readers are inexpensive compared to other technologies. Bluetooth also works indoors where GPS fails. Unlike other technologies, Bluetooth LE tags have a long battery life of up to several years. There are also tags that perform sensing and Bluetooth LE is suitable for use in electrically noisy environments. Bluetooth also integrates with Bluetooth LE devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

At Beaconzone we are seeing two new trends in use of RTLS. The first is using RTLS for multiple purposes. Customers often come to us wanting to solve a particular problem but later find the RTLS has a multitude of uses and benefits. This is where a closed solution offering, for example, a lone worker solution, won’t be so flexible.

Established real-time location system market players are shifting from closed solution offerings to including best-in-breed components in application layer
Allied Market Research

The second trend, brought on by Covid, is the tracking of office workers. What might have used to be seen as an invasion of privacy is now being seen as an essential way to monitor room occupancy and determine who has been in the same room as someone else when a person tests positive for Covid.

Read about BeaconRTLS

Read about BluetoothLocationEngine™

iBeacon Deployment Parameters for Locating

Researchers from the The Hong Kong Polytechnic University have a new paper on Performance Evaluation of iBeacon Deployment for Location-Based Services in Physical Learning Spaces (pdf) that tests environmental and deployment factors, indoors and outdoors, related to using ibeacons for locating. It provides recommendations for iBeacon deployment in terms of location, density, transmission interval, fingerprint space interval and collection time.

The paper provides a great introduction to positioning using beacon received signal strength (RSSI). It describes trilateration and fingerprinting methods for determining location.

Key insights are:

High temperature, strong wind and blocking by pedestrians degraded the signal strength.
Pedestrians traffic blocking the line of sight caused the most signal attenuation and variation.
High air temperature caused significant increase of packet loss that affected the RSSI.
Strong wind reduced the signal strength but didn’t affect the stability of signals.
Trees and nearby vehicle traffic didn’t have any negative effects on signals.
Lower error rates were observed when beacons were deployed on the ceiling as opposed to on the wall.
Positioning accuracy improved with ceiling placement due to the reduction of obstructions.
If ceilings are too high or ceiling deployment is impracticable wall mounted iBeacons should be placed as high as possible.
For fingerprinting, sample at 2m grid intervals for 6s to 10s at each point. Avoid having too many beacons as this won’t improve the positioning accuracy. A transmission interval of 100ms is detrimental to the positioning accuracy. 417ms is better.
For fingerprinting, positioning accuracy varies greatly according to the what is in the room.

The paper mentions that beacon UUID, major and minor are used to uniquely identify beacons. While this is true in the context of detecting using apps, most locating systems use gateways. Gateways use the Bluetooth MAC address to uniquely identify beacons and the advertising type, iBeacon, Eddystone or other, is irrelevant. Using gateways as receivers is also a solution to the problem of variability in receiving capability across smartphones.

The study only considered one beacon type and two receiving smartphones. At Beaconzone, we recommend experimenting with the actual hardware in the actual environment as, being wireless radio, optimum settings and can vary considerably.

Read about location accuracy

Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)

Hospital Asset Tracking

There’s a new article on MyLondon on How this Putney hospital is using smart technology to track down life-saving equipment. It explains how Putney hospital is using sensors to track equipment, such as ECG machines, to make them easier to find. They are also monitoring the temperatures of fridges and the occupancy of rooms.

The time saving is incredible… there are thousands of more things the hospital would want to track in the future
Toby Roberts, Putney Hospital Associate Director of Information

At BeaconZone we have customers using beacons to track wheelchairs, porters carrying medicines and the location of vulnerable Alzheimer’s patients.

We have found the main problem with introducing new technology into hospitals is lack of funding. Anything outside purchasing for the frontline is de-prioritised. Health providers tend to have have blinkered priorities that work against efficiency and cost savings.

If you think about having three key nurses and a couple of health care assistants running around the hospital for half an hour to find a piece of equipment, even if you just add up their hourly rate, let alone the increase in service quality, it’s really quite an easy equation to justify
Toby Roberts, Putney Hospital Associate Director of Information

Workplace Office Software Using iBeacons

Robin is workplace software that allows teams to manage meeting space and desk inventory via an office map. It uses iBeacons to determine worker presence.

People can book meeting rooms, move desks and find their teammates quicker. Analytics allow better understanding of space usage, identification of under-utilized areas and discovery of patterns in occupancy to proactively improve the office layout.

Robin has features that provide for return to work during the Covid pandemic with facilities to set up socially distanced seating plans that allow for your ideal capacity.

View iBeacons

In-Vehicle Bluetooth Sensing

Teltonika have an innovative range of advanced vehicle trackers that include Bluetooth. The tracker can scan for other nearby Bluetooth devices and send sensor data to a server.

There’s a getting started guide that explains how this is setup and provides screens showing how it works.

This allows not just for sensing telematics about the vehicles themselves but also about other assets or people. For example, if people carry beacons it’s possible to know who is driving or is in a vehicle. If you tag equipment usually stored in a vehicle you can determine where it is or if it is about to be removed from a vehicle. For temperature sensitive goods, such as medicines, you can continuously audit temperature compliance. It’s also possible to provide for location specific triggering, for example, producing work orders when a vehicle reaches an exact point whether or not there’s GPS coverage.

Safety System Using iBeacon

The Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering of TJS Engineering College, Chennai, India has a new paper on Women Safety System using iBeacon Technology.

It describes a system that uses iBeacon to provide tracking of women when out alone. As it uses iBeacon, it is presumably for use where GPS doesn’t work. Also, while not mentioned, it might equally be used for all vulnerable people including lone workers, young, old and disabled.

The system consists of a wearable belt that tracks location and sends alerts via cellular connection. It uses heartbeat, sound and pressure sensors to detect abnormal situations.

Using AI Machine Learning to Infer Distance

There’s new research by Guglielmo Marconi University and University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy on Indoor Localization System Based on Bluetooth Low Energy for Museum Applications.

The use of location in museums allows personalised tour guidance and on-demand exhibit information to be provided. Location also allows analysis of visitor flows to better design spaces through the identification of choke points and redundant areas.

The system had visitors emit Eddystone beacon advertising received by ESP32-based devices acting as gateways to a server.

The research is novel in that it uses AI machine learning on the received signal strength (RSSI) to infer location. This helps overcome the problems of variable signal strength experienced in indoor locations due to reflections and obstacles. It also prevents the need for fingerprinting the entire area which is time consuming and fails when the physical situation changes.

The method achieved accuracy of the order of 2m and this improved to 1m with the use of more receivers.

Read about Using Beacons, iBeacons for Real-time Locating Systems (RTLS)

Learn about BeaconRTLS™