A Contextual Investigation of Location in the Home Using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons
This work tackles the problem of improving contextual interaction in Ubicomp for users in home environments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing beacon standards and methods.
The study measured Bluetooth beacons in diverse home settings to address the gap between laboratory testing and real-world domestic contexts for location sensing, offering insights for designing 'seamful' indoor location approaches.
Location sensing is a key enabling technology for Ubicomp to support contextual interaction. However, the laboratories where calibrated testing of location technologies is done are very different to the domestic situations where `context' is a problematic social construct. This study reports measurements of Bluetooth beacons, informed by laboratory studies, but done in diverse domestic settings. The design of these surveys has been motivated by the natural environment implied in the Bluetooth beacon standards - relating the technical environment of the beacon to the function of spaces within the home. This research method can be considered as a situated, `ethnographic' technical response to the study of physical infrastructure that arises through social processes. The results offer insights for the future design of `seamful' approaches to indoor location sensing, and to the ways that context might be constructed and interpreted in a seamful manner.