iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
There’s an interesting new patent published from Qualcomm that involves detecting a physical hand on a virtual keyboard.
Methods of implementing mention iBeacon.
When thinking of beacons, people often think of beacons being used stand-alone for locating. However, more interesting and innovative uses, in collaboration with other technologies, have yet to be discovered and invented.
We recently came across RightHear, an app that assists people with orientation difficulties or vision impairments. It provides navigation information in indoor and outdoor settings.
The app acts as a virtual directory for users, directing them through locations with audio cues (such as ‘reception is 20 feet ahead to the left’ or ‘exit is 50 feet ahead’). Users can point their phone in a specific direction to learn what’s in front of them.
For companies, the app improves accessibility compliance, aids corporate responsibility and improves a brand’s narrative regarding inclusion. It works using Bluetooth beacons that are picked up by the app. The app creates auditory descriptions and notifications. There’s also a dashboard for companies/admin to control and track the solution.
We often go out to a local park to test the range of beacons. As we are regularly looking at our phones and moving about, people sometimes ask us if we are playing some sort of location-based game.
Location based games involve solving puzzles and finding clues via a location-enabled smartphone app. Examples include Ingress Prime, Minecraft Earth and Pokemon Go. While most only use GPS, beacons allow greater precision and use indoors. The user’s location and sometimes the location of other players is commonly shown on a map or plan. It’s also possible to use beacons with Augmented Reality (AR) to show the location of people or things on top of the camera image.
Location-based gaming isn’t restricted to pure gaming but can also be used to gamify other situations such as visitor spaces. The principles are the same except that simpler information is usually displayed, with clues and directions, rather than use from a gaming engine. Retailers such as Macy’s have also used gamification in retail.
There’s recent research from Thailand on Evaluation of Bluetooth Detectors in Travel Time Estimation. The researchers looked into the feasibility of using detected Bluetooth devices to estimate travel time and assess the affect of vehicle speed on Bluetooth detection performance.
Bluetooth provides a compelling method because it’s already transmitting from smartphones, car stereo speakers, wireless headphones and other devices such that dedicated transmitters are not required. Bluetooth devices are also non-intrusive and more affordable compared to other types of traffic sensors and don’t suffer from low light and inclement weather as with the case with automatic license-plate recognition.
A 28 km toll section in Bangkok was used for the study. Bluetooth detectors and microwave radar devices, for comparison, were installed to collect traffic data. The data for 20-days, with 2 million Bluetooth trips, was processed in 5 ways to estimate the travel time.
The resulting Bluetooth trip data was compared with the traffic counts recorded by microwave sensors. For inbound traffic, the detection rates for the study area were in the range of 50–90 percent during the day and 20–50 percent during the night. Slower traffic during peak periods made it more likely for the Bluetooth detectors to detect MAC addresses.
Nordic Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the System on a Chip (SoC) in many beacons, has published the latest online issue of Wireless Quarter Magazine. It showcases the many uses of Nordic SoCs.
The latest issue of the magazine highlights the use of the SoC in the following Bluetooth solutions:
There are also articles on how IoT is forecast to save eight times more energy than it consumes, a piece on smart homes and an in-depth explanation how advanced wearables are moving beyond fitness to provide better health outcomes.
After project rollout, human effort used in regularly replacing batteries can be significant and the human resource cost of doing so can dwarf the actual cost of the beacons. Hence, unless it’s a temporary scenario it’s best to specify beacons with as large a battery capacity as possible. Beacons with smaller capacity batteries are only suitable for short trials, temporary events or use during development.
While BeaconZone stocks a very large range of beacons, we purposely haven’t stocked any beacons with batteries smaller than CR2032 because the battery life of CR2025 and CR2016 beacons is usually too short. All our beacons use either CR2032, CR2450, CR2477 or AA batteries.
How long a battery lasts depends not just on the battery capacity but also the transmitted power, advertising interval and beacon processor chip type. This article only considers the battery itself.
Battery capacity is measured in mAh. The mA part (without the h) is the unit of current. As an example, a CR2477 battery typically has a capacity of 1000 mAh which means it can supply 1 mA for 1000 hours or, for example, 2mA for 500 hours. However, most beacons only use tens or hundreds of µA when transmitting, where 1 µA is 1000 times smaller than a 1 mA. Also Bluetooth beacons only transmit for a few milliseconds (1 ms = 1/1000 sec) at a time so you can see how a coin battery can last a long time.
Here are the main battery sizes and their typical mAh rating:
CR2032 = 250 mAh
CR2450 = 500 mAh
CR2477 = 1000 mAh
2 x AA = 2200mAh (Alkaline), 3000 mAh (Li)
4 x AA = 4400mAh (Alkaline) or 6000 mAh (Li)
A beacon such as the i3 containing 2 Lithium batteries can last 3x one with a CR2477 battery and 24x one with a CR2032 battery. This gives a battery life of up to 3 to 4 years depending on other configuration parameters.
Lithium AA batteries such as the Duracell Ultra Lithium and Energizer Ultimate don’t just last longer than Alkaline AA batteries. Their voltage also doesn’t vary so much with temperature which might be a consideration if your rollout is outdoors.
There’s a new project at Lincoln Memorial Gardens to help enhance visits for those who are visually impaired.
iBeacons will be set up at the end of this month (29 April 2022) to provide descriptions at key locations provided by bone conduction headphones after which the beacons will be usable by the public.
We have a new case study on our consultancy for Royal Museums Greenwich on the Cutty Sark.
Royal Museums Greenwich wanted to locate visitors as part of their forthcoming Cutty Sark Alive Augmented Reality (AR) experience.
Use our consultancy to help prevent problems that should have been known prior to commencement. Otherwise, ‘unknown unknowns’ can lead to project failure or force pivoting in less desirable directions. A small initial study prevents expensive and embarrassing mistakes.
As previously mentioned, we perform signal strength and stability tests across beacons. The data feeds into our consultancy work. Here are some high level observations.
The following graph shows the standard deviation of the RSSI @ 1m, for some of our beacons, measured over a 60 second time period:
Smaller bars are better and represent beacons
whose RSSI varied the least over time.
We found that beacons belonged to one or two groups. Firstly those with very stable RSSI and secondly those with an RSSI that had a standard deviation between about 4 and 6 dBm.
Signal stability is more important when you are using the RSSI to infer distance, either directly from the RSSI itself or indirectly via, for example, the iOS immediate, near and far indicators. RSSI varying without a change of distance might cause more spurious triggering. However, you should keep in mind that environmental factors can often cause variation much larger than the 4 to 6 dBm found in this test. Moving obstacles, for example people, will cause significant variation in RSSI.
Bluetooth LE advertising moves pseudo-randomly between radio channels. The channels use different radio frequencies that, in turn, results in fading of the signal at different distances. We experienced and mitigated similar behaviour in our LocationEngine™. Different radio frequencies experience different constructive and destructive interference at different physical locations. Beacons that move more between channels can cause more rapidly varying received signal strength (RSSI).
There’s new research from Universities in Piraeus, Greece and Berlin, Germany, together with U-Blox AG in Switzerland who create Bluetooth Angle of Arrival prototyping boards on Deep Learning-Based Indoor Localization Using Multi-View BLE Signal.
Processing of Bluetooth Angle of Arrival usually requires radiogoniometry spectral analysis of radio in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) signals in order to then determine location by triangulation. Instead, this paper proposes machine learning of IQ and signal strength (RSSI) data from multiple anchor points to determine location. AoA processing also uses distributed processing across the anchors to improve performance.
The developed machine learning models were found to be robust against modifications of room furniture configurations and materials and it’s therefore expected that they have high re-usability (machine learning generalisation) potential. The system achieved a localization accuracy of 70cm.