Evaluation of Bluetooth technology as a sensor of urban mobility

Bluetooth technology is more and more present in people lives. Cellphones, smartphone's, PDA's, MP3 devices, laptops, tablets and more recently vehicles, are some examples of devices where a Bluetooth interface is present. As these devices are always used or carried by persons, we can study patterns of human mobility by analyzing the electromagnetic signals produced by these devices, in this case by the Bluetooth interfaces. Among other options, these studies can be realized through activities of Collaborative Sensing. The Bluetooth technology is normally used in an environment that does not consider the mobility of the devices. An example of this is when we exchange files between a smartphone and a laptop, both devices are relatively close and motionless during the file exchange. In this paper we evaluate the potential of the Bluetooth technology as a source of data for human mobility analysis in dense urban environments with high mobility, such as a street in a city. For this, the probability of detecting a Bluetooth device in a mobile environment has been estimated both theoretically and experimentally. The achieved results show that Bluetooth is suitable for activities of Collaborative Sensing.