Poster: Bluetooth low Energy (BLE) beacons alone didn't work!

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon technology is projected to be the leading proximity technology. Various business sectors are rapidly applying it because of its automatic location sensing capabilities, low cost and high accuracy. However, understanding of how people adopt beacon-based location sensing applications is still very limited. We developed a BLE beacon based system for automating class attendance taking. Our first field study with 42 students showed that about 38% of the students adopted it. Students had several misunderstandings and concerns of the technology that challenged its adoption. We revised the design by integrating a participatory sensing approach, where users can manually check in to their class by explicitly sharing their location using GPS. We conducted a second field study with 45 students under the same instructor in the following semester. The overall adoption of the attendance taking system was increased to 80%.