Mobile Crowdsensing from Sensor Devices Using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

Recently, notifications to data acquisition and utilization from various kinds of sensor devices have been developed. With notification to sensor data, various methods of sensor data acquisition have been proposed, and mobile crowdsensing is regarded as a new paradigm for sensor data acquisition. However, mobile crowdsensing and other conventional methods are based on data acquisition from sensors modules installed in smartphones. In the era of Internet of Things, it is important that users can collect sensor data as they see fit, which is difficult to achieve by relying on conventional approaches based on sensing with smartphones. Thus, this paper presents a data acquisition method using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensor devices based on open source technology. In detail, the paper presents 1) a procedure to make BLE sensor devices based on Arduino; 2) and a procedure to develop smartphone applications of data transmission from BLE sensor devices based on Arduino. This paper also describes the efficiency of the proposed method through practical experiments.