Indoor positioning system using BLE beacon to improve knowledge about museum visitors

Abstract

Generally, a museum has many locations and artifacts collection that display for visitors. Museum manager often have difficulty in obtaining information on visitors behavior such as, is there are particular locations/artifacts in the museum that are frequently/rarely visit by museum visitors, how long visitors spend their time in particular locations/artifacts, etc. The purpose of this study is try to build a suitable system in order to improve knowledge about the behavior of museum visitors by identifying the position of visitors in the museum. This study uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacon that place around the museum. The visitor mobile phone will detect BLE beacon signal, then the mobile phone application will calculated the visitor’s mobile phone position using the signal strength from the BLE beacons that are detected. The application then sends it to the computer server to display it in as museum visitor heat map. From this information, the museum manager could find out the visitors behavior movement and know which areas/artifacts that frequently/rarely visit by museum visitors. According to distance error testing which compare real location and position of the calculation, it is show that the average of distance error is around 140 cm. So, it can be concluded that the information obtained is sufficient enough to represent the position of museum visitors.