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A Study of Bluetooth Low Energy performance for human proximity detection in the workplace

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Montanari, A 
Nawaz, S 
Sailer, K 

Abstract

The ability to detect and distinguish interactions in the workplace can shed light over productivity, team work and on employees’ use of space. Questionnaires and direct observations have often been used as mechanisms to identify office based interactions, however, these are either very time consuming, yield coarse grained information or do not scale to large numbers of people. Technology has been recently employed to cut costs and improve output, however precise interaction dynamics gathering often requires individuals to wear custom hardware. In this paper, we present an extensive evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as a technology to monitor people proximity in the workplace. We examine the key parameters that affect the accuracy of the detected contacts and their impact on power consumption. We study how this system can be implemented on popular wearable devices (i.e., Android Wear and Tizen) and the resulting limitations. Through a real world deployment in a commercial organisation with 25 participants we evaluate the performances of a BLE-based proximity detection technique. Our results show the suitability of BLE for workplace inter- action detection and give guidance to vendors and Operating System (OS) developers on the impact of the restrictions regard- ing the use of BLE on commodity wearables.

Description

Keywords

4605 Data Management and Data Science, 46 Information and Computing Sciences, 4608 Human-Centred Computing, Bioengineering

Journal Title

2017 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, PerCom 2017

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2474-2503

Volume Title

Publisher

IEEE