Sensing the Crowds Using Bluetooth Low Energy Tags

Sensing the crowds to understand crowd dynamics can be a challenging task. Passive sensing techniques such as camera-based sensing can provide flow detection, people counting, and density estimation, but they fail to provide accurate identification of individuals mobility patterns. Active techniques...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2016, Vol.4, p.4225-4233
Main Author: Basalamah, Anas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bluetooth
Bluetooth low energy
Crowdsensing
Energy efficiency
Hajj
Radio frequency identification
RFID tags
Smart phones
Smartphones
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Summary:Sensing the crowds to understand crowd dynamics can be a challenging task. Passive sensing techniques such as camera-based sensing can provide flow detection, people counting, and density estimation, but they fail to provide accurate identification of individuals mobility patterns. Active techniques such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags given to people require expensive RFID readers deployed to perform sensing. In this paper, we propose to use Bluetooth low energy (BLE) tagging as an alternative method. When low-cost BLE tags are set in advertisement mode, they can be detected by smartphones. In this paper, we design an architecture for sensing the crowds by requiring a large population carrying relatively cheap off-the-shelf BLE proximity tags, and considerably fewer participants to run scanning application on their smartphones to collect data. We performed a large experimental deployment with 600 tags and ten smartphones conducted during the five days of the world largest annual gathering (The Hajj). We were able to achieve ~90% detectability rate while effectively reconstructing the routes of the participants.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2594210