iBeacon, Eddystone, Bluetooth, IoT sensor beacons, apps, platforms
The Singapore Space and Technology Association has partnered with Airbus to launch a HADR (Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief) challenge. The objectives are to use latest technologies to aid rescue efforts.
Lee Wei Wen and Lee Wei Juin propose the use of iBeacon to display the GNSS locations of the rescuers with live updates of the rescue plan across different agencies:
Mr Beacon has an informative new video interview with Janette Smrcka, Information Technology Director at Mall of America. They use beacons to allow visitors to navigate across 520 stores on 5 levels, spanning 4.3 miles and over 5.6 million square feet.
Watch the video to learn about WiFi vs Bluetooth wayfinding and the advantages of mains as opposed to battery powered beacons. You will also learn how Mall of America’s beacon network might eventually be used to track mall assets and for location-based site maintenance.
When people think about beacons they often imagine them being detected in smartphone apps. This post explores other devices that can also see beacons allowing for different interaction possibilities and new scenarios.
Apps – Apps aren’t limited to just smartphone apps. You can run apps on TV boxes that run Android. Just make sure they have Bluetooth 4.3 or later.
Gateways – Gateways are small single pupose devices that look for beacons and send the information on via MQTT or REST (HTTP) to any server. This allows web servers to see beacons.
Desktops and Laptops – PC/Mac devices with built-in Bluetooth or dongles can see beacons.
Walky Talkies – Motorola manufacture the MOTOTRBO range of digital radios that can detect iBeacons and show their location on a map.
Raspberry Pi – This has Bluetooth and can be used to detect beacons.
AndroidThings – This special IOT version of Android can run apps that detect beacons and store and/or forward information to other devices.
Arduino – Arduino boards often have Bluetooth and can do things based on the presence of beacons.
Pixl.js – The manufacturer of the Puck.js also supplies a device with a screen that can detect and interact with beacons.
Single Board Computers (SBC) have an advantage over gateways in that data can be cached locally when there isn’t an Internet connection. They can also make decisions locally and send out alerts directly rather than having to rely on a server. This is so called ‘IoT Edge’ computing.
There’s a trend for beacons becoming parts of existing systems rather than being the main reason for having a system. The two way radio admin system (from Motorola) was one of the early examples. Newer examples are smart desk/meeting room systems, BlindSquare for navigation and (Cisco Meraki) WiFi access points.
Middleware used to create systems is also increasingly including support for beacons. An example is IBM’s MobileFirst Foundation service that has recently provided for beacons via a MobileFirst Adapter. This allows you to easily use beacons within mobile apps with data being stored in the IBM Cloud.
The latest Spring 2018 WirelessQ Magazine (pdf) from Nordic demonstrates some diverse uses of beacons. For example, it mentions the use of Beacons to open doors for the visually-impaired:
A later article in the magazine explains how Bluetooth Low Energy is rapidly
expanding into industrial markets:
“Bluetooth LE technology is growing far beyond its consumer roots by underpinning innovative solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things”
There’s an interesting recent post at twocanoes on how beacons can be used to detect which room a person is in, to then run the correct AR interaction:
“While ARKit is aware of the geometry of the room the phone is in, it doesn’t know what room it is in”
Beacons solve this problem. In fact, beacons are a useful addition to many apps. The more interesting usecases are often an ancillary use rather than the main use of an app or service.
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 can be used to detect when something is falling. The classic usecase is healthcare where patients can be monitored and an alert generated when they have fallen. However, fall detection can be used in other areas such as mountaineering and construction where human life is in jeopardy due to the high risk of a fall. It’s not just people that can be monitored. Fall detection can be used for valuable/fragile items in places such as warehouses, factories or even in transit.
Detecting falling uses an accelerometer in the beacon. Some sensor beacons generate x y z data that can be used to programatically detect the fall. The problem with this is you need relatively complex local processing such as a smartphone or single board computer to analyse the x y z data. A solution is the iBS01G that not only detects that the beacon is falling but also indicates when the beacon is moving, has gone from still to moving or moving back to still.
The advertising data event status shows the movement states:
The states can be logged or shown directly in an app or sent to a server via a WiFi gateway.
There’s a useful new article by Martin Bryant on Lessons learned from an experiment to transform Manchester’s local news. One of the insights was:
“A few beacons went missing in the first week”
People will steal beacons even if they are password protected and can’t be re-used. They don’t know they are useless and steal them anyway.
We once had a strange request from the UK Police to supply our “ugliest beacons”. In some situations, the requirement is for beacons that will blend into the environment rather than advertise their presence visually. While high visibility, attractive beacons might be great for proof of concepts and demos, in the real world beacons that blend into their environment work best.
There’s often a temptation to hide beacons behind things. However, beware of blocking the radio signal and hence reducing the range. We had a client use beacons in a stadium and they painted them to camouflage them from view. Hide your beacons, but don’t block the signal.
There’s an interesting app/service called Voolsy, in India, that uses iBeacons to enable a slick restaurant mobile app. The key thing here is that beacons are mentioned just once on their web pages. The emphasis is, instead, on making the dining experience “enriched, hassle free and smooth”.
Take a look at your current and proposed beacon based solution and see if you can remove almost all references to beacons and instead concentrate on the problem being solved for your users. That way you are more likely to engage customers and less likely to alienate them with what’s, to them, incomprehensible technology. Beacons are an enabling technology, not the solution.