Proximity-based reminders using Bluetooth

A smartphone is a personal device and as such usually hosts multiple public user identities such as a phone number, email address, and Facebook account. As each smartphone has a unique Bluetooth MAC address, Bluetooth discovery can be used in combination with the user registration to a server with a Facebook account. This makes it possible to identify a nearby smartphone related to a given Facebook contact. Using this capability, we designed Memorit, an application that handles reminders alerting the user when a contact is nearby her/him. This way it is possible to trigger a user-defined reminder, for example to give back a book, when a registered contact comes in proximity. Data collected from Memorit will allow study of pervasive social context. This paper gives an overview of Memorit, its features, implementation, and evaluates its applicability through a user study.