The Find Me Profile in Bluetooth devices can help users find lost items with a specific Bluetooth tag, and the Proximity Profile can help users keep important items around them and find them when they are far away from them. However, these two profiles are not as well-known as Bluetooth Beacon.

Bluetooth Beacon is a very successful application of Bluetooth technology. It is used in a variety of situations, providing location and proximity services for airports, galleries, train stations, sports stadiums, retail stores and more.

The need for accurate positioning and direction finding

Many applications require more precise location data than current Beacon services can provide, and determine the direction of the target. Although Beacon has been serving us for years, it has not been able to meet the higher level of needs.

High precision indoor positioning

A major advantage of this technology is the ability to more accurately determine the user's location in complex indoor environments such as airports, thus creating more reliable and user-friendly indoor navigation systems and more precise proximity class solutions.

High precision asset tracking

There are many scenarios for asset tracking, including enterprise asset tracking in an office environment, and tracking to monitor which manufacturing process stage a product component is in. Tracing such use cases often requires precise location capabilities.

Continuous direction finding

Today, there are many devices on the market that use Bluetooth to track lost items. A smartphone app can estimate the distance to a lost item from signal strength. However, without available directional information, multiple attempts are required to track a lost item using such a device, making it difficult to find it quickly and accurately.

By using a directional feature that continuously updates the direction of lost items, you can create a solution that leads users directly to lost items without having to make multiple attempts.

Directed search

If a painting in a gallery is tagged with a directional search function, when visitors point their phone at the painting they are interested in, an app on the phone will filter the signal from all the other paintings in the room, select which painting the phone is facing and provide information about it. In addition, directed search has the ability to search for items in a specific direction through special features.

Bluetooth high precision direction finding

The latest version of the Bluetooth core specification introduces new features to support high precision direction finding. Since the controller specification has been upgraded, special hardware with built-in antenna arrays can be used to help calculate the direction of the received radio signals. The host controller interface (HCI) has also been modified so that the advanced stack where directional calculations occur can use data obtained by the controller.

Today, it is possible to use Bluetooth direction finding to create proximity location systems with more than meter accuracy, such as indoor location, pathfinding, asset tracking, object tracking, and directed search.

Bluetooth direction finding uses proven engineering techniques to determine signal direction and standardize associated interfaces, interactions, and critical internal operational interactions. Precise direction finding is now compatible with manufacturers and will be widely used to create a new gen eration of advanced Bluetooth location services.

Reprinted from RFID World network