Disseny i desenvolupament de serveis basats en beacons pel Campus del Baix Llobregat

Abstract

Beacons are devices of small dimensions and great autonomy that are based on the Bluetooth Low Energy technology to diffuse, within a range of up to 100 meters, a unique identifier and a range of parameters or data. If it is received by a compatible smartphone, this information allows to offer different services to any type of public. The objective of this paper is to verify the feasibility of integrating, in a mobile application, useful services based on beacons for the educational community of the Baix Llobregat Campus. Also, we pretend to document the technology on which these devices are based, in terms of hardware and software, in order to understand better their limitations and the opportunities they can offer in our application scenario among others. As a result of this paper, a number of services have been proposed and implemented in an application available on Google Play. The application, called beaconsUPC, has been developed with the Ionic framework, which has allowed us to program it with Web technologies (Typescript, Sass and HTML) and, thanks to that, an Android and iOS app has been made. In addition, the application has been validated from the attachment of beacons in some buildings of the Campus. The difficulty of using beacons lies in knowing what services are useful to customers. If that combination is achieved, many companies will have succeeded since, having a mobile application installed in customers' smartphones, allows such companies to have a direct communication. Consequently, they can improve their brand image and also obtain economic profitability, for example, by sending advertisings.