About the relationship between people and discoverable Bluetooth devices in urban environments

Authors:
Tom Nicolai;Holger Kenn
Affiliations:
Universität Bremen, Germany;Universität Bremen, Germany
Venue:
Mobility '07 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on mobile technology, applications, and systems and the 1st international symposium on Computer human interaction in mobile technology
Year:
2007

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Abstract

People are frequently carrying their Bluetooth enabled mobile phones in their pockets while moving through public spaces. With only a small fraction of these being set to discoverable mode, it is possible to estimate the number of persons in proximity by conducting Bluetooth device inquiries. In this paper, we present a method for the measurement of the percentage of people with discoverable devices. We did experiments using this method in Bremen, Germany and San Francisco, US, suggesting that about 2%, respectively 6%, are detectable. Further, we show that this measurement can well be implemented on common mobile phones, and that specialized scanners are not necessary.