There’s an innovative use of beacons mentioned in the research paper on Developing a Human Motion Detector using Bluetooth. Beacons and its Applications (PDF). Most motion sensing applications usually place a sensor beacon on the things that will move. The accelerometer in the beacon reports movement. The research paper describes an alternative method of detecting movement of a person, an elderly person in this case, based on the change in blocking of the beacon signal over time. This has the advantage that the beacon doesn’t need to be worn. Also, it doesn’t have to be a accelerometer beacon ..read more

RTLS systems are used to track the location of objects or people, tagged with Bluetooth beacons, in real time. Some of the advantages of using a RTLS include: Improved efficiency: RTLS systems allow organisations to track the location of assets or personnel in real time, which can help improve the efficiency of operations. For example, a RTLS system can be used to track the location of equipment in a warehouse, allowing workers to quickly locate and retrieve items when needed. Enhanced safety: RTLS systems can also be used to improve safety in a variety of settings. For example, a RTLS syste ..read more

There are three main ways beacons can be integrated into existing systems: 1. Using Smartphone Apps Beacons are usually stationary. Apps on users’ smartphone use the standard Bluetooth iOS and Android APIs to detect beacons and send information to your cloud or servers, typically via HTTP(S). 2. Using Ethernet/WiFi Gateways Beacons are using moving. Gateways in fixed positions detect beacons and send information to your cloud or servers, typically via HTTP(S) or MQTT. 3. Using an Intermediate Platform Such as a Real Time Location System (RTLS) This is a variant on #2 in that gateways send info ..read more

There’s a research paper by researchers from Taiwan on A practice of BLE RSSI measurement for indoor positioning. The paper looks into received signal strength (RSSI) to distance conversion, the significance of antenna plane (orientation) and measurements in two different situations, a low noise classroom and a more noisy manufacturing site workshop. Techniques employed included developing a signal propagation model, trilateration, modification coefficients and Kalman filtering. The hardware used included an Arduino Nano 33 (Bluetooth 5) and Linkit 7697 (Bluetooth 4.2). Over 1.6 million samp ..read more

A Real-time locating system (RTLS) automatically tracks the location of objects or people. Beacons, sometimes called tags, are placed on things that move and gateways, sometimes called locators, detect the beacons and send data to software either locally or in the cloud. A user interface shows the current locations. BeaconRTLS Most organisations looking for a RTLS for the first time don’t know what aspects of systems are most important. People usually focus on maximum accuracy when, in fact, a system with maximum accuracy involves consequent undesirable compromises. Some suppliers’ marketing a ..read more

A growing number of WiFi access point vendors such as Cisco and Aruba are offering Real Time Location Systems (RTLS). While using existing hardware might seem compelling, it’s sometimes not practical. Here are some questions to be answered when considering such systems: Does your site have access points from mixed vendors? If so, the RTLS won’t work across them. Does your site have enough (overlapping) access points to support the RTLS? What will be the latency? Hardware providing WiFi access point functionality and Bluetooth scanning can’t provide optimal throughput leading to much lower lat ..read more

Our BeaconRTLS and PrecisionRTLS produce a lot of historical data. How this data is used varies considerably from project to project. One use of the data is for determining human behaviour. For example, consumer behaviour, workplace safety behaviour, developmental child behaviour or other health-based analysis. There’s recent research into Indoor Location Data for Tracking Human Behaviours: A Scoping Review that’s meta research in that it’s an analysis of past RTLS-based human behaviour research. The Canadian researchers looked into the varied ways behaviour can be extracted from RTLS data and ..read more

Today’s just-in-time and busy manufacturing processes means that manual tracking of pallets for inbound and outbound shipments often can’t keep pace with the speed of production. Production and assembly requires the quick locating of components. Delays and inaccuracies due to lost components lead to increased costs, employee frustration and ultimately customer disappointment. Competitive pressures are also driving the need to reduce labour thus reducing the capacity to manually search for items. Customisation using configured options and demand-driven production is also increasing the degree ..read more

If you are an owner or manager considering implementing a RTLS you might need to justify the return on investment (ROI). In some cases this is easy but in others a quantitative assessment of ROI can be tricky. The simpler usecases where RTLS is used to automate manually finding items can be easily assessed. For example, workers might be spending a lot of time finding the right pallet in a warehouse or a nurse might be spending too long looking for a shared piece of expensive equipment. Not knowing where things are is increasingly becoming unacceptable for businesses. Times and salaries can be ..read more

There’s a new paper from the journal Telkomnika Telecommunication, Computing, Electronics and Control on Smartphone indoor positioning based on enhanced BLE beacon multi-lateration (pdf). The paper by Ngoc-Son Duong of Vietnam National University describes a relatively simple method to improve location accuracy. The paper starts by describing trilateration and the author voices the opinion that another method, fingerprinting, requires a lot of effort and isn’t feasible for practical implementation. The new method makes use of the fact that accuracy is usually good when the received signal str ..read more