A BLE-Based Marathon Runner Timing System Using Multidirectional Antennas to Improve Timing Stability

Marathons have recently become popular sporting activities. Due to the competitive nature of marathons, organizers often use automatic timing systems to ensure fairness and impartiality. However, for small- and medium-sized marathon organizers, the existing timing systems are too costly to deploy, so human supervision and timing are still often used. This study proposes an automatic timing system for marathons based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with multiple antennas. Compared to similar studies, this design has higher timing stability. By comparing the characteristics of the received signal strength (RSS) received from multiple antennas, our system can determine when the runner passes the checkpoint. This study uses deep learning algorithms to deal with noisy RSS from multiple antennas. During the evaluation, 20 runners participated in experiments at four locations, demonstrating the scalability of the proposed system. The results showed that the accurate detection of the timing for marathon runners was 96.8%, which could be further increased to 100% if a 1-s timing error is acceptable.