IoT – Page 6 – BeaconZone Blog

Catch Rodents with the Help of Beacons

There’s an interesting Video on YouTube by Marcus Rangell who has used a RuvviTag to get a notification when a mousetrap has been triggered:

Using a RuuviTag is probably over-engineering the solution. Any beacon that provides motion triggered broadcast would be suitable. Also, it’s simpler to use gateways to scan the beacons.

While this scenario might seem frivolous, the problem is real and some US companies already implement trap activation detection. There are many warehouses, food factories and food storage facilities that have rodent problems. The usual mouse and rat traps are ok but they need checking regularly as decaying rodents also aren’t desirable. Triggered traps also need re-arming as they are the ones most likely to catch more rodents. Doing the checking manually across many sites can be a full time job for many people. Trigger detection can be automated such that only triggered traps have to be visited and the resultant data can be used to automate the creation of simple reports of the most troublesome sites/areas.

Beacons and The 4th Industrial Revolution

We previously wrote about how beacons are part of Industry 4.0 and how implementations need to achieve a return on investment. Industry 4.0 is also being called ‘The 4th Industrial Revolution’ (4IR).

Oracle and the EEF have an excellent free, recent, paper (registration NOT required) on The 4th Industrial Revolution: A Primer for Manufacturers. It concludes 4IR isn’t hype and should be taken seriously. Here’s how manufacturers themselves see 4IR:

Manufacturing is undergoing a transformation. The report says it’s all about data connectivity. However, the report falls short on explaining how data can be sensed and captured. Sensor beacons, gateways and beacon platforms such as our BeaconRTLS are one such solution that helps fill that gap.

IoT Return on Investment for Industry

Mr Beacon has an interesting new interview with Sam Jha, Chief Business Officer of Alpha Ori. Alpha Ori work with the shipping industry that’s still lacking the productivity gains many other industries have experienced through the use of IT. While the interview talks about shipping, it’s equally applicable to all industries.

In the shipping industry, IoT can be used to measure ships’ systems. This can produce thousands of data points per second that can be analysed using ‘big data’ techniques. The key is to identify insights that have value in that they can impact the areas where there are large costs. An example is maintaining up time and using sensing to estimate the life remaining on machinery, detect when things are starting to fail and replace preventative maintenance with predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Better maintained ships can also have the side affect of reducing other costs. Smart ships have lower insurance risk profiles and can hence save insurance costs.

The key message is one of identifying areas where there are large costs and using IT to optimise those areas. In shipping or any industry this usually involves sensing on machinery and systems to maintain optimum up time. It also involves detecting when to perform in-time maintenance to get the maximum life from expensive machinery. Beacons, particularly sensor beacons, provide the sensing part and are especially suitable for areas that don’t have power, lack cabling or are difficult to monitor manually due to accessibility.

Read about beacons and the IoT

The State of IoT (and Beacons)

There’s an interesting new video by Mr Beacon on the state of IoT. It’s an interview with ex-Intel Aidoo Osei with insights on the business side of IoT.

Aidoo talks of IoT being a technology searching for a meaningful problem people are willing to pay to solve. The important part is ‘pay’, as many initiatives such as smart cities require a thorough understanding of how these things might be financed. Also, for many IoT technology providers, there’s a tension between providing open, inter-operable systems and wanting to own the stack.

Aidoo provides an upbeat view of beacons. He thinks beacons are simple at the moment because phones/apps are more capable. As beacons become more used as components of IoT systems, there’s an opportunity for them to be more complex.

While Aidoo didn’t mention this, one example of beacons becoming more complex is the use of mesh networking.

Bluetooth Beacons in Factories, IoT and Industry 4.0

McKinsey has a useful chart where they assess the potential impact of the IoT by segment:

It can be seen that ‘Factory’ has the greatest potential. This links with ‘Industry 4.0‘, the current trend for more automation and data exchange in manufacturing with the aim of significantly improving efficiency. But what does this mean in practice and what are challenges? Can these be solved with Bluetooth beacons?

We have learnt that while just about every industry client has different needs, all solutions involve context and location. Context is sensing, while location is where the sensing occurs.

Requirements we have experienced range from being able to pick up documents for particular machinery through to actual sensing such as detecting vibration is within (safety) bounds for ‘aggressive’ equipment. We have also seen the requirement for matching workers with workstations and jobs as well as the tracking of workers, tools, pallets, parts and fabrications. There’s also the need for real-time overviews for short term safety and efficiency management, the same longer term data also being used for process improvement and planning.

So why beacons?

Low power. Sensors need to have a long life because replacing them or their batteries requires human effort and they are sometimes placed in normally inaccessible and dangerous areas. Beacons are ideal for this because some have up to 5+ years battery life and others can be permanently powered.
Sensing. Various off the shelf sensor beacons are available. Custom variants are possible to sense industry specific metrics.
Connectivity. Several gateways are available to connect to WiFi. Alternatively, it’s possible to use smartphones or small single board computers as gateways. There’s a trend for ‘Fog’ or ‘Edge’ gateways that only send pertinent data on to the cloud and can provide direct alerts quicker than being dependent on the latency of the cloud.
Cloud management. Software such as our BeaconRTLS platform allows for the management and visualisation of sensors.
Security. Beacon devices are password protected and the gateway to cloud communication is protected using standard Internet protocols.
IoT needs to be made easy. This is BeaconZone’s role. As we mentioned, with the IoT every client has different needs. We bring together ready-made hardware and software components so that they can be dovetailed to create solutions.

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

Read about BluetoothLocationEngine™

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.

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™

Value in the Mundane and the Internet of Diversity

As we previously mentioned, the IoT is a nebulous concept covering many specialist areas and industries. It’s more like an Internet of Diversity as opposed to an Internet of Things.

Take a simple usecase we came across at a recent IoT Meetup. A US company provides rodent control ‘as a service’, having thousands of traps over tens of mainly retail (food) sites. Every day, people go out and see which traps have caught rodents. This involves a huge amount of expensive manpower and vehicles. LORAWan, in this case, is being used with sensors on traps to allow only those traps needing attention having to be visited. This has led to a huge decrease in costs.

There are two observations. The first is that there’s value in what might initially seem to be mundane. The second is that this usecase is very different to many other diverse scenarios. There is no rat trap IoT solution you can buy off the shelf and it’s not cost effective for a 3rd party to develop and market one. Off the shelf RTLS solutions are unlikely to be suitable and even if they can collect the data, the dashboards and information aren’t applicable to this usecase.

We are already seeing that the IoT platforms that are most useful are those that are simple to change yet most flexible. Platforms need to be simple enough to customise for diverse usecases and yet be flexible enough to show data in a domain-specific way.

Beacon Trajectory Smoothing

The problem with using RSSI for detecting location is that raw data contains lots of noise. Also, this noise becomes more prevalent in the viewed data when location samples are taken less often. There’s a useful new article at InfoQ on Processing Streaming Human Trajectories with WSO2 CEP.

The idea uses Kalman filtering to smooth noisy human trajectories.

Before and after filtering

This method is particularly useful for large realtime IoT rollouts because it uses a very small memory resource, is very fast and the calculation is recursive, so new values can be processed as they arrive.

Machine Monitoring Using Bluetooth Beacon Sensors

There’s a new article at RFID Journal BLE Eavesdrops on Machine Health With Augury System that describes how Bluetooth LE sensors can be used to monitor machine health. Such systems can be used to detect when machines have been working, when they weren’t working and the ‘big data’ can sometimes be used to predict failure. Such events can trigger real-time alerts.

This scenario is an example of Beacon Proximity and Sensing for the Internet of Things (IoT). This isn’t limited to monitoring machines. It can be used to monitor people, animals, plants, stock assets or just about anything.