Information gathering system based on BLE communication for bus information sharing

摘要

Information gathering system is focused to manage service status in public transportation. The traditional systems employ a special device to collect various information such as a location, a number of passengers, an operational status, etc. to enhance service quality. On the contrary, the cost of the special device is relatively expensive compared to consumer devices. As a result, some researchers have tried to use a consumer device to collect the information. Smartphones are first candidate devices for this purpose because they have an internet connection through a cellular network. Additionally, participatory sensing methods, where many common people collaborate to collect information on their own smartphone, have been focused for information gathering. Participants are requested to collect demanded information by a sensing system in participatory sensing methods. Therefore, flexible information can be collectable. On the contrary, participatory sensing methods may not be enough to collect information continuously because ordinary people may not exist in a service area. In addition, only smartphone devices are not enough to collect special information for public transportation service. 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. Additionally, 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 hands-free operation of the smartphone application because 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.