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Driven to distraction
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3 January 2012 Vehicles and people ‘could be monitored by Bluetooth in phones’
Just as society has become accustomed to the idea of monitoring road traffic levels by tracking on-board GPS on vehicles, a system is under development to track both vehicles and pedestrians in city environments by sensing the presence of Bluetooth in mobile phones. The system is being developed by a Spanish company, Libelium. It is said to be capable of sensing the flow of Bluetooth devices in a given street, roadway or passageway – and can even differentiate between hands-free car kits and pedestrian phones. The data is gathered by a local sensing device, which then transfers it to a central point via another local wireless technology, ZigBee. Although ZigBee has a limited range, it can be extended by means of a "multi-hop" approach, delivering the data to an internet gateway at some convenient point for collection and analysis on a web server. At the heart of the idea is Libelium’s Waspmote expansion radio board, which supports both Bluetooth and ZigBee technologies.
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