Occupancy Detection for Building Emergency Management Using BLE Beacons

Being able to reliable estimate the occupancy of areas inside a building can prove beneficial for managing an emergency situation, as it allows for more efficient allocation of resources such as emergency personnel. In indoor environments, however, occupancy detection can be a very challenging task. A solution to this can be provided by the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons installed in the building. In this work we evaluate the performance of a BLE based occupancy detection system geared towards emergency situations that take place inside buildings. The system is composed of BLE beacons installed inside the building, a mobile application installed on occupants' mobile phones and a remote control server. Our approach does not require any processing to take place on the occupants' mobile phones, since the occupancy detection is based on a classifier installed on the remote server. Our real-world experiments indicated that the system can provide high classification accuracy for different numbers of installed beacons and occupant movement patterns.