Author: Support

Beacon Locating Accuracy

There’s a useful article by Steffen von Bünau of Kontakt on Real Time Location Systems (RTLS). Steffen says:

“Accuracy is an expensive vanity metric unless it is necessary to get the job done.”

Most scenarios don’t usually need very accurate positioning and creating unnecessarily accurate systems is expensive. Steffen doesn’t say why they are expensive but one of the article’s comments provides an answer. Ultra wideband based RTLS is expensive compared to Bluetooth LE.

Also, accurate systems tend to need calibration that’s time consuming and costly in human resource. Calibration implies tuning to a particular physical and wireless environment. If the environment changes then so might the calibration.

The required accuracy of a RTLS should be derived from the business requirements.

Singapore Heritage Trail

There’s a new heritage trail of Little India in Singapore that uses Physical Web beacons to guide visitors through unique facts and stories, historical photographs, and crowd-sourced content.

The article on their web site is a great example how you can a) provide clear instructions on how to use the Physical Web and b) provide an incentive to start using. In the case of the trail there’s a contest. If you use your mobile device to access the Little India Physical Web Experience you can redeem a gift.

Samsung Browser Brings the Physical Web

There’s an interesting article by Peter O’Shaughnessy, Developer Advocate for Samsung on Bringing the real world to your browser with CloseBy. It describes how Samsung’s web browser detects Physical Web beacons. It works in a similar way to Google’s Chrome/Android in that it uses a proxy server to get and cache information (the title) of destination web addresses.

While it’s good to see the Physical Web expanding, we can’t help but question what this means for multiple notifications. Will Google and Samsung be both providing notifications for the same Physical Web beacon?

More Cruise Ships Using Beacons

We previously wrote about how Carnival Cruises was rolling out beacons on their cruise ships. MSC Cruises have recently announced that they will also be using beacons as part of their ‘MSC and Me’ technology to allow guests to track their kids, navigate the ship, receive messages and book activities.

The use of beacons in hospitality is currently an area ripe for innovation. Cruise companies seem to be one of the first, probably because a) beacons can impact on a large number of areas and b) the resultant data and opportunities for added value selling can be valuable to the companies.

Improving on Beacon Immediate, Near and Far

We recently highlighted an article on Beacon Trajectory Smoothing. Faheem Zafari, Ioannis Papapanagiotou, Michael Devetsikiotis and Thomas Hacker have a new paper on An iBeacon based Proximity and Indoor Localization System (pdf) that also uses filtering.

They use a Server-Side Running Average (SRA) and Server-Side Kalman Filter (SKF) to improve the proximity detection accuracy compared to Apple’s immediate, near and far indicators.

The researchers found:

The current (Apple) approach achieved a proximity detection accuracy of 65.83% and 67.5% in environment 1 and environment 2 respectively. SRA achieved 92.5% and 96.6% proximity detection accuracy which is 26.7% and 29.1% improvement over the current approach in environment 1 and 2 respectively

What’s interesting here is that the researchers have quantified the accuracy of Apple’s implementation in two scenarios. The accuracy isn’t that good and as the researchers have shown, can be improved upon significantly.

The Use of Beacons in Smart Cities

There’s a recent paper by Gonzalo Cerruela García, Irene Luque Ruiz, and Miguel Ángel Gómez-Nieto of the University of Córdoba, Spain on State of the Art, Trends and Future of Bluetooth Low Energy, Near Field Communication and Visible Light Communication in the Development of Smart Cities (pdf)

The paper explains how technologies (NFC, BLE, VLC) will be important for the Internet of Things in smart cities and how they will need to be connected via LoRaWAN, Sigfox, Weightless, LTE, and 5G. With regard to Bluetooth LE they say:

Another challenge for the attention of BLE technology is the limited range problem; the range is directly dependent on Broadcasting Signal Power. An increase in signal power makes BLE devices less energy-efficient. Moreover it is necessary to improve accuracy in determining proximity to a BLE device.

The range problem will become less of an issue once Bluetooth 5 devices become available.

Can Beacons Be Used on Aircraft?

We have had enquiries whether beacons can be used on aircraft. While there’s no specific guidance on beacons from aviation authorities, beacons transmit the same radio signals to other Bluetooth devices such as the FitBit, Android Wear, Apple Watch and Bluetooth headphones. These devices are classed as Personal Electronic Devices (PED).

The use of PEDs depends on the airline. Both the FAA and EASA have guidelines for the use of PEDs. Smart Luggage is No Longer Allowed.

Using Beacons for Switching Content

There’s a great new post on Medium on iPadlocks – The Magic of Activation Beacons by Geoff Elwood of Specialist Apps. Geoff talks about using Beacons to unlock information such as Adelaide Zoo education and career trails. This allows for differentiated learning that replaces “custom codes, logins or other bits of paper”. Different experiences can be provided to different groups.

In a different scenario Geoff describes how the Bendigo Heritage Trust switches beacons on/off to provide for content that synchronises with audio/visual content and the physical location of a moving tram.

At BeaconZone was have come across beacons switching content in two other scenarios. The first is at events where content on visual video walls is synchronised with different beacon advertising and hence different content. The other use is in digital signs in streets/shopping malls that change the beacon advertising in response to different advertising.

Beacon RTLS Accuracy

Steffen von Bünau of Kontakt.io has an interesting article on “Jobs to be done – Accuracy in Real Time Location Systems”. He asks:

Who will use the information and what is to be achieved with it?

He questions whether organisations need room level accuracy or location within a room.

As Steffan says, trilateration can be used for positioning within a room.

However, determining accurate location within a room is much harder and more expensive to achieve and needs fingerprinting. Fingerprinting involves going over the target area to sample beacon signal strengths that’s time consuming. It’s also the case that the more you tune these things, the easier it is that they can go out of tune when the environment changes. New or changed items in a room can easily change signal strength readings and cause the need for re-fingerprinting.

As Steffen says:

“Accuracy is an expensive vanity metric unless it is necessary to get the job done.”

Read more about beacons for RTLS and our BeaconRTLS platform.

Read about BluetoothLocationEngine™