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I am trying to make an application, that will tell me about user location, for example i need to know when user entered the office and when he exit. I tried geofencing with regions, but in my case it is not reliable, i dont have much experience with beacons this is why i dont know how reliable are they, also i would't place a gps locator on the user. I only want to know when he is in on his working place.

FYI not related to controlling people, only to check availability. I would like to ask you for if there is better or an alternative solution on how to do this.

P.S: iOS app
P.P.S: i would like to know more about this, not a ready to go solution (thought it will also be nice :D)

sken3r.MI
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  • Suspect if your users know this, they will turn off this feature on their phone. – zcui93 Mar 01 '16 at 09:06
  • @zcui93 Please read the question more attentive, it is used for availability purposes, and no the user will not be able to turn this off, the question is how to get precision, from geofencing or if there is a better solution. – sken3r.MI Mar 01 '16 at 09:11

2 Answers2

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I've been working a bit with iBeacons (it was a year ago though) and their reliability depends on the brand. An iBeacon has an UUID which you need to add to your app in order for you to listen to the correct iBeacon. Furthermore the iBeacon sends its signal using bluetooth so you need to have bluetooth running on the device with the app doing the listening.

Basically if you want to know when a user enters a room you'll need to set up an iBeacon in the room which sends a signal that the user entering the room catches using your app, and where your app in turn sends some kind of callback to a backend (or however you want to send the information).

You wrote that you want to know when a user enters/leaves his/hers workspace, and to do this with iBeacons the user either needs a unique iBeacon which sends a signal to your app, or the user needs to have your app which catches a signal from an iBeacon placed in the workspace. Furthermore the reliability in the precision of iBeacons are very bad, if there is a wall between the iBeacon and the app searching the signal the distance can easily give a faulty precision of 20m.

It doesn't sound like iBeacons are the way to go. You could of course place iBeacons around, for example, an office and have each user use your app. Your app in turn then listens on the different iBeacons and when it registers a beacon it sends data to a backend API telling that the user has entered the office.

Don't have a solution for you though, sorry :<

ClockWise
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  • by workspace i meant not a desk ) but the entire office. Thank you very much for your time and explanation, i'll still have to check if it is good enough, but its sure better than geofencing – sken3r.MI Mar 01 '16 at 09:32
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While the loaded term "spy" will certainly put off a lot of people, the basic idea here is a fairly common beacon use case. Tracking user location is perfectly fine provided that the user opts-in and knows what is going on.

The basic implementation is simple. Put one beacon with a location-specific identifier near each entrance. The app will monitor for detections of this beacon, and each time it is detected the app can record an event of that indicates the user entered or exited the workspace.

The main reliability problem with this approach is that the app cannot know whether each detection was an entry or an exit. A user could walk to the entrance then immediately leave. If the user did this twice separated by four hours, it would look identical to the system as a user arriving then leaving four hours later. Solving the above problem means placing beacons throughout the building to provide near full coverage. This may not be practical.

Even with the above limitation, the technique can provide good enough data for some use cases.

davidgyoung
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  • you are probebly right about the title :D, people may be to lazy to read the question, it was intended to be funny, thank you for your explanation – sken3r.MI Mar 01 '16 at 13:20