A Tourism Support Framework using Beacons technology

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Vietnam’s tourism industry has been severely affected. Innovative technology should be applied to overcome the difficulties and challenges in the tourism system with low-quality human resources. In this research, we introduced a tourism support framework that leverages the Internet of Things (IoT) technology to improve the performance of the tourist industry and transform traditional travel into smart travel. As the key technology, Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons are employed at the core of our framework. Furthermore, a mobile application that interacts with beacons to satisfy visitors’ demands was developed. By recognizing the user’s actual location, our solution allows visitors to access information everywhere rapidly. Thanks to the capabilities of beacons, the system can also monitor the high accuracy indoor traffic at the small area tourist landmarks where the Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot work correctly. IUTour – a case study application was developed to validate the key functionalities of the proposed framework. In addition, the proposed framework further enables the tracking location and indoor navigation feature in real-time for buildings, museums, university campuses, and libraries to be integrated. The functionality comparison between IUTour and other applications indicated that our proposed software offers better performance than previous models.