Context and awareness of our surroundings helps us to make important decisions every day, without even realising it. The senses humans use every day help us to decide how to react to situations and influence our behaviour. While our phones have some context, such as date, time, geo-location and somesensory information, they arent always as smart as we need them to be.
What are Bluetooth beacons
Bluetooth beacons are an assistive technology that help to connect physical objects or spaces with mobile devices, helping to provide context to the areas that were in or the things we are in front of.
In the simplest terms, they can help to provide what a user needs, in the right location, at the right time.
While beacons arent the magical answer for every business or every situation, in many instances, they could prove to be transformational and save millions in costs and time.
If we look at some of the use cases of beacons, we see that they can benefit everything from fieldwork, construction, healthcare, transportation and travel and leisure.
Engineering, maintenance or other field based roles
Often, engineers time will be spent going to every asset, checking it, logging information about it and, if required, spending time maintaining it. In many cases, engineers may be equipped with paper based documentation, or a mobile device to log the information. In each case, time would be spent logging each part of the process or finding relevant documentation.
With beacons, when an engineer approaches each asset, it can trigger past service history and then provide the engineer with exactly what they need, based on the asset they are in front of.
By utilising other sensors, that can log the temperature, electricity, humidity, pressure or others, the potential is for the engineer to focus on the assets that need attention. From the interaction with beacons, the information can be collected and fed into the companys backend, to help with business intelligence.
In one example, using beacons to save around 30 seconds off on-site process for one company, could equate to over 10m of efficiency savings when applied over a large field team.
Construction
By placing beacons on site, the right information can be made available based on where employees are, or the task they are doing.
If implemented properly, entering into a beacon range could trigger a safety alert which needs to be acknowledged by employees, via a wearable or on their mobile devices. This can have obvious benefits from a site safety and legal perspective, for both the employee and the company.
Thinking beyond this, connecting beacons with sensors will allow companies to evaluate conditions on site. Integrating beacons with sensors can help to identify when an environment is no longer safe or suitable for construction workers to be in.
Read about more sectors and beacons on the next page…
Healthcare
In healthcare, beacons can trigger apps to provide patients and staff with the right information, at the right time and in the right place. This could include information about how to navigate around a hospital, delivered via voice prompts or on screen messages. Equally, it could be used to bring up the right patient information, allowing doctors to easily make updates, without having to spend time looking for specific notes.
Following conversations with various healthcare providers, it has become apparent that beacons hold a lot of promise to help provide better information to both employees and patients. They can be used for everything from asset tracking and information, to navigation around hospitals.
Transport
In the transport industry, context is important from both an internal and external perspective. Better intelligence can be fed through to help provide rail companies with better intelligence about the status of trains, their location, schedule cards and maintenance alerts or issues. This information can also be used to provide customers with better information about delays, or even how busy certain services may be.
Beacons can be utilised to help to create driver advisory tools that provide drivers with context based on their location, especially in areas with poor GPS coverage. Beacons can also be utilised to improve the accuracy of GPS, when properly integrated along routes.
Travel and Leisure
Beacons have the ability to provide information to users in their native language, by triggering the right information at the right time. London is one of the worlds top tourist destinations, yet very few signs are in anything other than English. Whilst English is one of the most spoken languages in the world, visitors may not be as proficient as signage may suggest.
The technology could be placed around airports, so that notifications of delays and gate assignments could be delivered instantly to passengers mobile devices. Taking it a step further, beacons placed in transport hubs could push other value-added services to passengers, like transfer or car hire information.
Logistics
Some logistics firms are also interested in using beacons for the whole logistics cycle. This includes picking and packing in the warehouse, through to loading onto the vehicle and using it as a security and health and safety feature for all operatives.
For example, if a user walks into a particular area where special equipment is required, and it isnt detected, the user can be alerted and information can be sent back in real-time to the controller to monitor the situation. Additionally, this could also be used to track whether users enter areas that arent safe.
Thinking beyond devices
When it comes to utilising beacons, this is a technology that companies can have complete control over as they will generally be deployed within their own spaces and make up inventory. As a result, companies can choose to use them in whichever way seems fit for adding context and proximity intelligence to the ways in which end users engage.
Its not a technology that is going to be useful to every company, or for every situation, but in the examples shown above, beacons can deliver a huge amount of value and help to deliver benefits across businesses.
Mike Crooks is head of Mubaloo Innovation Lab.
