Information Gathering System Based on BLE Communication for Bus Information Sharing

Abstract

Information gathering system is focused to manage service status in public transportation. Smartphones are first candi- date devices for this purpose because they have an internet connection through a cellular network. Participatory sensing methods, where many common people collaborate to collect information on their own smartphone, have been focused on information gathering. A sensing system requests participants to collect demanded information. On the contrary, they may not be enough to collect information continuously because ordinary people may not exist in a service area. This paper proposes a collaborative mechanism with BLE devices with sensors and smartphones to realize the information gathering system. The proposed mechanism employs Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices as a beacon device that triggers our special application for smartphones. BLE devices also store demanded information with sensors. The special application can be automatically launched when a beacon message arrives on the smartphone and can obtain the demanded information from the BLE device. The benefit of the proposed system is a hands-free operation of the smartphone application because the information gathering process is performed in a background process. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed application can measure its position with a GPS receiver and can upload the obtained location to the cloud automatically.

Keywords

• participatory sensing
• bus location system
• ble
• information gathering system