Estimating Dining Hall Usage Using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons

Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons are a relatively new technology that has recently found extensive use in various industry and marketing fields. While these beacons have begun to be used in research settings, much of the focus has been related to indoor positioning, and not on general place detection and user patterns. In this paper we use BLE beacon data to detect visits to the dining hall, and analyze these visitation patterns from the perspective of what would be useful to our institution's dining services department. For the data collection, we leverage a BLE beacon sensing-enabled institutional app to collect data from over 700 users during finals week, as a preliminary study of the capabilities of such data.