iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
Researchers from Idiap Research Institute and EPFL, Switzerland have been looking into the use of smartphone data, include Bluetooth metadata to try to infer social context, for example whether someone is alone or not. The paper Understanding Social Context from Smartphone Sensing: Generalization Across Countries and Daily Life Moments (pdf) attempts to better understand human … Continue reading “Using Bluetooth Metadata to Infer Social Context”
There’s new research from the USA on Indoor Localization using Bluetooth and Inertial Motion Sensors in Distributed Edge and Cloud Computing Environment (PDF). The paper describes a low-cost, scalable, edge computing system for tracking indoor movements in a large indoor facility. The system uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Inertial Measurement Unit sensors (IMU) and … Continue reading “Indoor Tracking of Individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment”
There’s new research from the University of Illinois titled Packet Reception Probability: Packets That You Can’t Decode Can Help Keep You Safe (pdf). Many existing systems estimate distance using the Receiver Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) which is negatively impacted by sampling bias and multipath effects. As an alternative, the study uses Packet Reception Probability (PRP) … Continue reading “Using Packet Loss to Infer Location”
There’s new research from Maritime and Ocean University, Republic of Korea on A Close Contact Tracing Method Based on Bluetooth Signals Applicable to Ship (pdf). While the Covid pandemic is over and we are getting on with our lives, there are still outbreaks that can be particularly disruptive on ships. The cruise market was adversely … Continue reading “Close Contact Tracing Using Beacons”
Bluetooth to WiFi gateways allow Bluetooth devices to communicate with WiFi networks and onward to local or Internet servers. A gateway converts the Bluetooth data into data that’s received at the server. This data usually includes the gateway MAC address, the beacon MAC address, the received signal strength (RSSI) and the raw beacon payload that’s … Continue reading “Subscription-free Bluetooth Gateways”
There’s new research in the Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics on Bluetooth beacons based indoor positioning in a shopping malls using machine learning. Researchers from Algeria and Italy improved the accuracy of RSSI locating by using AI machine learning techniques. They used extra-trees classifier (ETC) and a k-neighbours classifier to achieve greater than 90% … Continue reading “More Accurate Beacon Locating Using AI Machine Learning”
Most Beacon usecases involve putting beacons on things or in places and triggering notifications on users’ phones. There’s a paper by Yang Yang, Zhouchi Li and Kaveh Pahlavan of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, MA that instead proposes Using iBeacon for Intelligent In-Room Presence Detection. Their system records users in a room for applications such as graduate … Continue reading “Using Beacons for Intelligent In-Room Presence Detection”
The MG3 is a new mini USB Bluetooth-WiFi gateway. It’s a more affordable version of the G1 with slightly less capability: The MG3 collects advertising data from all Bluetooth LE devices and then sends JSON data to your server by HTTP(S) or MQTT using WiFi. The MG3 processes up to 70 Bluetooth devices per second. … Continue reading “New Minew MG3”
INGICS, supplier of Bluetooth WiFi gateways and sensor beacons, has a new open source example. The BeaconLair code is implemented using Docker to simplify setup. Internally it uses Golang, Eclipse Mosquitto, InfluxDB and Grafana. The platform receives data from INGICS iGS03 BLE gateways and data from iBS sensor beacons. The dashboard, using Grafana, provides gateways … Continue reading “INGICS Example Server Side Platform”
Bluetooth beacons advertising iBeacon can be used to perform indoor locating using trilateration. Trilateration is where three receivers are used to measure signal strength (RSSI) to calculate the position. It’s possible to use ESP32 single board computers as Bluetooth receivers. The GitHub project iBeacon-indoor-positioning-demo has an example open source implementation. There’s also an accompanying blog … Continue reading “Indoor Positioning Using iBeacon and ESP32”