A TinyML-Approach to Detect the Proximity of People Based on Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons

Proximity detection is the process of estimating the closeness between a target and a point of interest, and it can be estimated with different technologies and techniques. In this paper we focus on how detecting proximity between people with a TinyML-based approach. We analyze RSS values (Received Signal Strength) estimated by a micro-controller and propagated by Bluetooth’s tags. To this purpose, we collect a dataset of Bluetooth RSS signals by considering different postures of the involved people. The dataset is adopted to train and test two neural networks: a fully-connected and an LSTM model that we compress to be executed directly on-board of the micro-controller. Experimental results conducted over the dataset show an average precision and recall metrics of 0.8 with both of the models, and with an inference time less than 1 ms.