Forums: Projects Theory and Miscellanea:

A friend of mine wants to track participants movements at a conference (with their permission). She wants to to do data analysis and a flash display.

The plan is to give each delegate a badge which they can attach to their clothing.

I would imagine the best way to do so would be via bluetooth- and some sort of triangulation.

So then, the question is, will a bluetooth dongle (the cheapest option i can think of) transmit without being plugged into the USB port of a PC? ( i assume it would not, as the USB supplies power)

Is there any simple/similar technology that we could use?

I realise that the obvious route would be to track bluetooth enabled cellphones, but we cant be sure that enough people to be statistically accurate will have bluetooth cellphones.

did this thing fly in the end or weren't there any cost-effective solutions?

RFID?

was just talking to a colleague at work who mentioned that he was getting "spammed" by bluetooth ads in a shopping centre. He had his phone turned on for receiving bluetooth transmissions and worked out eventually it was coming from the various electronic signboards.

Sadly, funding was not available, and so it has been relegated. Still keen to do it though, one day.

I did do a fair amount of research, and it is possible to detect bluetooth devices even when set to "non-discoverable" - you just cant communicate with them. They even give away an unique ID.

So then we decided on a few static class 1 bluetooth devices set to detect all and triangulate positions. I didnt get into the programming part as there was no money and very little time, but the concept is not too hard.

We have a few shopping centres that spam via bluetooth, I would certainly never agree to accept that shit!

great, thanks for the reply. I didn't realise the shopping centre spamming existed, I've never seen it come up on my phone but then I only have bt on for headset (earpiece)

Actually. some students in New York have been in contact, they want to do something similar, so I might be back on the project.. will keep posting.

That'd be great. I'm interested to see what you use and how it will be deployed as it might be something I could also use in a work environment