GB2559336A

GB2559336A - Monitoring building occupancy

Info

Publication number: GB2559336A
Application number: GB1701464.8A
Authority: GB
Inventors: Bytheway Sean
Original assignee: LINE MAN GROUP Ltd
Current assignee: LINE MAN GROUP Ltd
Priority date: 2017-01-30
Filing date: 2017-01-30
Publication date: 2018-08-08
Also published as: GB201701464D0

Abstract

A system for monitoring building occupancy whereby persons 52 in the building carry portable beacons 54 configured to periodically transmit an electromagnetic beacon signal 56. Receivers 60 mounted at fixed locations in an area ofa building 50 receive the beacon signals of the portable beacons, outputting resultant signal data to a computer system 58 configured to determine physical locations of the portable beacons, possibly using RSSI or trilateration. A further embodiment comprises unique beacon identifiers associated with users and a database which is used to determine a users identity and contact details; information can then be transferred to a users portable digital device based on the location of their beacon. Multiple beacon signals can be demultiplexed using their respective identifiers. Bluetooth (RTM) may be used as the beacon signal. The receivers may be mounted in the ceiling of a building, possibly in a grid formation. Electronic display screens or other functions of a building may be controlled based on a users triangulated physical location within the building.

Description

(54) Title of the Invention: Monitoring building occupancy

Abstract Title: Building occupancy system comprising periodically transmitting personal beacons picked up by fixed receivers and outputted to a computer for calculation (57) A system for monitoring building occupancy whereby persons 52 in the building carry portable beacons 54 configured to periodically transmit an electromagnetic beacon signal 56. Receivers 60 mounted at fixed locations in an area ofa building 50 receive the beacon signals of the portable beacons, outputting resultant signal data to a computer system 58 configured to determine physical locations of the portable beacons, possibly using RSSI or trilateration. A further embodiment comprises unique beacon identifiers associated with users and a database which is used to determine a user’s identity and contact details; information can then be transferred to a user’s portable digital device based on the location of their beacon. Multiple beacon signals can be demultiplexed using their respective identifiers. Bluetooth (RTM) may be used as the beacon signal. The receivers may be mounted in the ceiling of a building, possibly in a grid formation. Electronic display screens or other functions of a building may be controlled based on a user’s triangulated physical location within the building.

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Application No. GB1701464.8

RTM

Date :4 July 2017

Intellectual

Property

Office

The following terms are registered trade marks and should be read as such wherever they occur in this document:

Wi-Fi

Bluetooth

Estimote

DVD

IBeacon

Eddystone

Intellectual Property Office is an operating name of the Patent Office www.gov.uk/ipo

MONITORING BUILDING OCCUPANCY

The present invention is concerned with monitoring of the occupancy of a building.

There are important incentives for organisations to monitor the occupancy and usage of their premises. Consider for example the use of office space. It is estimated at the time of writing that in the UK the annual cost to a company of maintaining a single office desk - allowing for rent, rates (real estate taxes), energy costs and so on, is in the range from £12,000 to £17,000 pounds sterling. So there are potentially large cost savings to be made if firms can improve the efficiency with which they use their desk space. As use of digital technology has increased, many firms have moved away from the traditional practice of allocating a desk to every employee. Individuals can spend an increasing part of their work time away from the office itself, reducing usage of desks in the office, and their working environment - being essentially digital - is not physically tied to a given desk or work station. As a result, firms find that they can increase the rate of desk occupancy (the ratio of desk-bound employees to desks) from the traditional 1 to a value which may be as high as three or more.

So proper planning of building usage gives management important opportunities for cost saving, but to make use of these opportunities without endangering the smooth operation of the organisation, quantitative information is needed about the use that is made of a building. Such information is important when considering spending on real estate, informing decisions about the scale of office space purchased or rented. Experience has shown that organisations can dramatically over-estimate the day-to-day occupancy of their office space, resulting in wasted expenditure. Information about building usage and (subject to privacy considerations) about individuals' movements around the building can also offer insights into ways that organisations can improve their working practices.

Information about locations of individuals in buildings can also be used directly in control of automated systems, and can be provided to other individuals to improve operating efficiency.

As to control of automated systems in a building, it is known to control lighting automatically, e.g. turning lights in a given space on only while it is occupied and thereby reducing waste of power lighting spaces which are not in use. Access control systems may unlock an entry point in response to the detected presence of a certain group of users.

As to the use of location data by other individuals, consider for example the advantages in being able to find - e.g. by use of an app on a mobile computing device - where the colleague one needs to speak to is in a large building, or the opportunity to tailor the individuals' experience in the building to them personally, e.g. by providing a welcome message specific to a visitor in a waiting area. As another example, an efficient system for scheduling and allocation of working space needs to receive up to date data about occupancy, in order to direct individuals to unoccupied spaces.

So information about building occupancy can:

inform management decisions about investment in real estate;

assist in improvement of working practices;

be used in automation of building functions (such as lighting and air conditioning);

facilitate efficient allocation of working space;

improve the experience of a building's users, offering them new and personalised functionality.

This is not an exhaustive list.

While much of the present discussion relates to use of office space, the present invention is not necessarily applicable solely in that context. It may for example be advantageously applied in buildings used for manufacture or for warehousing, where monitoring of the locations of individuals may provide valuable insight into working practices and into ways in which those can be improved.

Various means have been proposed for monitoring occupancy of a building.

Passive infra-red sensors are widely used for detecting whether a given room contains any occupants, which is useful e.g. for control of heating or lighting. However this mode of sensing is not well suited to determining how many occupants a room has, or where in a room an occupant is.

Many buildings have computerised systems controlling perimeter access. For example security conscious organisations such as banks often have automatic turnstiles at entry points which admit an individual in response to a swipe of a magnetic card. Using data from perimeter access systems it is at least possible to establish the number of people in a building at any given time. This data is useful but limited - a system that detects only passage through a perimeter cannot give information about rates of occupancy of specific locations within a building.

Another approach that can be implemented without need of dedicated infrastructure is to detect when and where individuals log onto or off a computer system. Practically, this proves to be a poor indicator of the real occupancy of a given space. Individuals may for example log onto their desktop computer routinely on entering the building, but spend the bulk of their working day away from it, say in a meeting room.

For more detailed and reliable building occupancy data, use can be made of an indoor positioning system.

Operation of satellite-based navigation systems such as GPS is impaired within buildings, rendering such systems unsuited to monitoring of building occupancy. But there are several known technologies that use some form of portable transceiver carried by an individual to exchange signals with some form of transceiver network mounted in the building to provide information on the location of the portable transceiver and by inference on the location of the individual.

In some such technologies, the portable transceiver carried by the individual is a portable computing device, in particular a mobile phone or tablet, or laptop.

The conventional wireless local area networks (WiFi) used in buildings to provide internet connectivity can be used to give positional data on a connected device and there is a body of literature on WiFi positioning systems, but for present purposes these suffer from two major disadvantages. Firstly the positional data is typically subject to a large error. WiFi networks typically provide a limited number of connection points. Opportunities for accurate trilateration are therefore limited. This approach may typically provide positional data with an error band in excess of 10 metres. Secondly mobile devices are often only connected intermittently, if at all, to a building's WiFi. Even when a user has connected to the local WiFi, existing mobile devices typically switch WiFi connectivity off as they move into power save mode. So one cannot rely on communication between say a mobile phone and a WiFi network to give up to date positional data on the phone and its user.

For systems intended to monitor occupancy of individual desks/workstations, it is desirable to be able to establish not only that an individual is in a certain room in the building, but also where in the room he/she is - at which desk is he/she sitting?

There are technologies being widely promoted at present which make use of beacons operating according to the Bluetooth standard to detect proximity of a suitable device to a beacon. Bluetooth enabled portable devices, when suitably configured, scan for other Bluetooth devices in range frequently, so that Bluetooth can be used to give more reliable real time information.

One widely known example is the iBeacon (RTM) system from Apple (RTM), which uses beacons (which can be positioned at a given fixed location) to periodically transmit an identifier using the Bluetooth low energy protocol. The signal can be received by Bluetooth enabled devices such as mobile phones or tablets in the vicinity of the beacon, and the device in question can then make a response triggered by its proximity to the beacon. This technology is expected to have applications in marketing, for example, allowing marketing content to be provided to a user in the vicinity of a beacon. Another, somewhat similar, standard for Bluetooth beacons which is being promoted at the time of writing is Eddystone (RTM) from Google (RTM). In both these systems the fixed beacon is a relatively simple device whose primary function is to transmit the beacon signal. Processing needed to respond to the beacon goes on in the portable device. For an example of the manner of use of such systems in a retail environment, refer to US2016/0088443, in the name of Estimote, Inc.

IBeacon and Eddystone are thus envisaged for use in proximity detection, enabling a portable digital device such as a mobile phone (cell phone) to detect when it comes into range of a beacon. They can be used in this manner to give some positional information if the portable device has a record of the location of a set of beacons. Detection of a certain beacon implies that the device is within range of that beacon and hence within a certain distance of its known location. But the communication range is several metres, so the accuracy achievable by this method is poor. Received signal strength can be used to estimate distance from a beacon, and if beacons are deployed at sufficient density for the portable device to communicate with more than one beacon at a given time then trilateration techniques can be used to improve somewhat the accuracy with which the position of the portable device is estimated. According to this approach, information necessary to establish position is obtained by the portable device, not by the system of beacons, and the required processing can be carried out by an application running on the portable device. US2016/0088443 again provides an example.

US2016/0309304 describes among other things an application implemented on a mobile device which is able, by use of Bluetooth or Near Field Communication sensors, to detect when it is located in one of a set of discrete locations in a building (e.g. in a room of the building) and then to display a route to another room in the building to the user, to facilitate navigation about the building.

In principle position finding systems of this type based upon standards such as IBeacon and Eddystone may be used to monitor occupancy of a building by multiple users. Practically, the portable device carried by users will typically be a mobile telephone. It is able to establish its own location based upon exchange of signals with a set of beacons mounted at known physical locations in the building. Each mobile phone can transmit its location data through a suitable network, such as the building's WiFi, to a central server which maintains a record of occupancy, and in this way a central repository of occupancy data can be created.

However there are various reasons why this approach to indoor positioning is not an ideal way to provide data on building occupancy. These include the following:

the portable device used for the purpose will typically be a mobile telephone, which some users will inevitably deactivate from time to time, or fail to charge, or leave to charge, or simply leave on their desk;

the received amplitude of the beacon signal is central to the trilateration technique used to establish the location of the mobile telephone. Since the orientation in which the mobile telephone is carried by the user may vary, it is typically necessary to assume that its antenna has an essentially isotropic characteristic - i.e. the detected signal strength is not dependent on the antenna's orientation. But real mobile telephone antennae are non-isotropic, which reduces the accuracy with which location can be established;

antennae characteristics and other relevant properties of mobile telephones vary from one model to another, and a given population of individuals will typically have a range of different models of phone, which is an additional source of inaccuracy in the positional data;

use of mobile telephones in this manner depends on each user downloading and running a suitable application. In practice some users, such as visitors, may be reluctant to do so.

Another technology which can be used in an indoor positioning system is RFID tagging, as to which see Assessment of WSN and RFID Technology For Real-Time Occupancy Information, Calis et al, published by the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction, http://www.iaarc.org. RFID systems have been widely adopted for tracking and identifying items. They typically comprise a simple dedicated tag attached to an object which is to be identified and/or tracked, the tag communicating - usually through a low frequency RF interface - with a separate reader. Establishing the actual location of the tag (beyond its proximity to the reader antenna) is not a basic function of most RFID systems, but there are existing schemes for achieving this as described in the aforementioned paper. But frequencies used in RF tagging limit the accuracy of this.

The Calis et al paper also describes attempts to use known wireless sensor network technology in monitoring of building occupancy. Wireless sensor networks use sensor nodes which are capable of sensing, processing data and communicating wirelessly.

A need remains for a way to monitor building occupancy which is cost effective and straightforward to implement but which is capable of providing accurate data on the locations of individuals in a building.

According to a first aspect of the present invention there is a system according to the appended claims.

Specific embodiments of the present invention will now be described, by way of example only, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:Figure 1 illustrates an interaction between a Bluetooth beacon and a Bluetooth receiving device, belonging to the prior art;

Figure 2 represents in schematic form a set of Bluetooth beacons and a Bluetooth receiving device, belonging to the prior art;

Figure 3 is a conceptual level diagram of a building occupancy monitoring system embodying the present invention;

Figures 4a and 4b represent, in cross section and in plan respectively, a ceiling tile carrying a receiver 60 according to an embodiment of the present invention; and

Figure 5 is a conceptual level diagram of a system for providing location-based services to a user, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is a standard for wireless communication over short range between digital computing devices. It was designed for low power consumption and uses transceiver chips which are widely available at low cost. Wireless communication is made via radio waves at frequencies between 2.4 GHz and 2.5 GHz, within a band which is set aside for industrial, scientific and medical devices by international agreement. References herein to Bluetooth include references to all current or future Bluetooth standards and technologies including Bluetooth low energy (Ble), Bluetooth Smart, and all editions and revisions of the standard from Bluetooth 1.0 through Bluetooth 5 and beyond.

Bluetooth beacons are transmitters (which term does not exclude transceivers, as used herein), which can be compact and essentially self-contained, that broadcast a beacon message, typically at regular intervals. The beacon message may comprise a unique identifier according to the Bluetooth standard. Bluetooth beacons can be powered by a small on-board battery, and due to the low power requirements of Bluetooth chipsets that battery can give some months of service between replacements. As noted above, Apple (RTM) and Google (RTM) have each developed Bluetooth beacon technologies, known as iBeacon and Eddystone respectively. There are open source alternatives to Apple's iBeacon.

Bluetooth devices are typically capable of providing an indication of the power of a received radio signal, often referred to as the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication, which is a signal strength percentage) or the RX (received signal power, nominally in milliwatts). The definition of RSSI is not part of the Bluetooth standard and varies from one chip manufacturer to another.

Figure 1 provides an example of an interaction between a Bluetooth beacon 10 and a Bluetooth receiving device 12. This form of interaction belongs to the prior art. The beacon 10 emits a sequence of radio signals 14 modulated to form beacon messages, which attenuate as they move away from the beacon, giving an effective range R which may be some tens of metres in the absence of obstacles. If the Bluetooth receiving device 12 moves inside the range R then it receives a sufficiently powerful radio signal to read the beacon message. The range R is dependent on the properties of both the beacon 10 and the receiving device 12. Where the beacon message contains a unique identifier, the receiving device 12 is thereby able to identify the beacon 10 from which the message originates. The receiving device is able to determine amplitude of the received signal and hence determine the RSSI, or received signal power RX, which is a function of the distance d between the beacon 10 and the receiving device 12 and, the broadcast power and the relationship between distance and attenuation being known (in the simplest case power density of the broadcast signal diminishes in proportion to the square of the distance d), can thus be used as a basis for estimation of that distance. This prior art configuration thus provides a form of proximity detection. It can be used to determine a circle around the fixed beacon 10 within which the receiving device 12 lies. But it does not amount to a positioning system as such.

Bluetooth Positioning Systems

As noted above, many applications of Bluetooth beacons are based merely on proximity detection. For instance, the receiving device 12 might be a mobile phone (cell phone) carried by a potential customer in a shop, and the beacon 10 be mounted by a display of goods for sale. When the receiving device 12 is carried inside the range R of the beacon it is able to detect proximity of the beacon and respond appropriately, e.g. by providing marketing data.

Where Bluetooth beacons have been used or proposed for positioning systems as such, able to estimate position and not merely to detect proximity to a spatial location, this has typically been using the type of configuration depicted in Figure 2, in which multiple beacons lOa-E are provided at fixed locations. The device 12a whose position is being determined acts in this case as the receiving device. It receives beacons from those beacons lOa-c which are within range and can estimate its distance from each based on the RSSI determined for each of the separate beacon signals. These distances can then be used as a basis for trilateration to estimate actual position of the receiving device. Note that in this configuration it is the portable device 12a that has the data needed to determine its own position, and the processing is carried out by the portable device itself. If position data is to be collected at a central database, it thus needs to be transmitted from the portable device 12 through some form of network or connection, such as a LAN 18, to that database 20.

A system embodying the invention

Figure 3 represents a system embodying the present invention implemented in a building 50.

Each of a plurality of people 52 in the building is provided with a beacon 54. In the present embodiment the beacon 54 is a simple dedicated device which serves to periodically emit a beacon signal 56, which is a Bluetooth low energy signal. The beacon signal 56 carries an identifier which may be unique to the beacon 54. The identifier may be associated, in a database in computer system 58, with a specific person 52 to whom the beacon 54 has been allocated. The system is thus able to identify people in the building 50.

The beacon 54 may have limited processing capability since its primary function is merely to emit the beacon signal 56. In this embodiment of the invention, the beacon 54 carried on the person 52 does not carry out the processing needed to ascertain its own position, in contrast to the prior art configurations in Figures 1 and 2. The beacon 54 may be powered by an onboard battery, which takes the form of a replaceable watch battery in the present embodiment. Suitable Bluetooth beacons are commercially available. A renewable source such as a solar cell or a mechanism for harvesting kinetic energy during motion may be used to charge an onboard battery in other embodiments, the energy requirement of the beacon being low. The beacon 54 can be compact enough to be very easily carried or worn. It may be integrated with a personnel ID pass to be clipped to the lapel or worn on a lanyard around the neck.

The beacon 54 emits the beacon signal 56 at intervals. In the present embodiment these intervals are approximately regular and are chosen to be two seconds, which provides a battery lifetime of the order of six months. A different interval may of course be chosen in another embodiment of the invention. There may in practice be multiple beacons 54 in range of one another. Interference of one with another is avoided by means of a carrier sense multiple access strategy in which the beacon 54 refrains from transmitting a data packet while another beacon 54 is transmitting.

The beacon signal 54 is received by a subset of a plurality of receivers 60 mounted in the building. Note that the term receiver as used herein does not exclude transceivers capable of both receiving and transmitting.

In the present embodiment the beacon 54 is configured to transmit the beacon signal 56 only when inside the building 50. This is advantageous in that it prevents people 52 from being tracked by use of the beacon signal 56 - possibly without authorisation and for nefarious purposes - while outside the building 50. To this end the receivers 60 send out a periodic activation signal for receipt by beacons 54 inside the building. The beacon 54 is configured to adopt an inactive state if it fails to receive an activation signal for a sufficient period of time. In the inactive state the beacon 54 does not transmit the beacon signal 56, but is capable of receiving the activation signal to return it to the active state and reactivate the beacon signal 56.

The receivers 60 are in the present embodiment mounted in a grid pattern to ceilings within the building 50. One possible form of mounting is depicted in Figure 4. An opening 62 is formed in a ceiling tile 64. The receiver 60 is mounted over the opening and is in this example hard wired, cabling 63 being led from the receiver 60 through the opening 62 into the void above the ceiling tiles. In the present embodiment receivers are placed in a square grid pattern at 5 metre intervals. Other arrangements and intervals may be used, and the precise arrangement of receivers 60 for a given building will typically be chosen based on a survey of the building.

According to the present embodiment the receivers 60 each comprise a standard Bluetooth 4LE module combined with an RS485 converter and time division control unit. They may be connected in a daisy chain formation.

Looking again at Figure 3, the beacon signal 56 is received by only those receivers 60 within its limited range. In respect of each of those receivers 60, data is generated which identifies the beacon 54 through the identifier contained in the beacon signal 56, and which provides - in association with the beacon's identity - a distance value representative of the distance of the beacon from the relevant receiver, as well as the identity of the receiver itself. In the present embodiment this corresponds to received signal strength, and specifically it takes the form of the RSSI referred to above. So in operation there will normally be multiple distance values being output by multiple receivers 60 in respect of a given beacon 54. These values will collectively be referred to as beacon signal data and are used to establish the location of the beacons 54.

A receiver 60 may receive multiple beacon signals 56 from multiple different beacons 54 during a given two second time window. These can be thought of as a time division multiplexed signal, so that the separation of data attributable to one beacon from data attributable to the others is a process of demultiplexing.

In the present embodiment the beacon signal data is transmitted to a location engine 70 of the computer system 58 through a network 59, which may in principle be a local area network or a wide area network, and which is formed in the present example by the internet. The computer system 58 may therefore be at a separate location from the building 50.

In the location engine 70, the individual digital signal received from a given receiver 60 in respect of a given beacon 54 is first processed to reduce noise. This is a form of digital filtering. In the present embodiment multiple RSSI values received over a chosen interval of time are analysed, the modal value being selected to represent the relevant signal over the relevant time period. Thus for example values obtained over a thirty second time interval are analysed, according to the present embodiment. Given that two second interval between beacon signals 56, this gives 15 individual values. The values are grouped into ranges, and the number of values in each range is counted. Whichever range is the most frequent serves as the output value V for that 30 second interval.

The output value V is used to obtain the distance D from the receiver 60 to the beacon 54. The relationship between the output value V of this process and the actual distance from the receiver 60 to the beacon 54 is non-linear. Most simply, the signal can be thought of as diminishing in proportion to the square of the distance. This can be used to estimate distance. More sophisticated approaches take account of additional factors which affect received signal strength. The physics and the practice of such calculations are well understood and known to the skilled person.

The location engine 70 thus generates a set of distances D, representing the distance from the beacon 54 to the /th receiver. These distances are used in a process of trilateration to establish the beacon's position. The principles and practice of trilateration are familiar to the skilled person. Subject to measurement error, the beacon 54 is known to lie at the intersection of a set of spheres each centred at the known location of the /th receiver and each having a radius D,. By straightforward geometrical analysis, the position of the beacon 54 can thus be established. It may take the form of X, Y and Z coordinates defined with reference to an origin at a known location in the building 50. These coordinates may be subject to a further filter to further reduce noise. This may take the form of a low pass digitally implemented filter.

The process has been described with reference to a single beacon 54 but in a real building there will often be multiple beacons 54, each representing an individual whose location in the building is to be monitored. The beacon signal data associated with each such beacon 54 can be distinguished based on the identifier provided by the beacon, and each beacon 54 can thus be individually located and tracked.

Usage of the occupancy data

The data generated by the illustrated system can be used in a range of different ways to improve the use of the building 50, and to inform decisions taken by management of an organisation.

The data may be collated over a period, analysed (as represented by analytics engine 72 in Figure 3) and output in the form of a human readable occupancy report to provide a manager using e.g. a computer terminal 74 with information on the manner in which the building is being used. A wide range of different indicators can be monitored. These may include data relating to individuals such as attendance, absence, time spent in the building 50 on a daily or cumulative basis, where in the building the individual spends their time, how long they spend in the canteen, etc. And the data may be additionally or alternatively be collective or statistical in nature, giving rates of occupancy of particular rooms or regions, indications of usage hotspots, data on diurnal variation of occupancy and so on.

The data may be analysed - at the level of the individual or otherwise - to look for adjacencies which might be exploited to improve organisational effectiveness. For example, if one individual attends the building 50 regularly on Mondays and Tuesdays only while another attends largely on Wednesdays and Thursdays, it may be effective to allocate a single desk to the two of them.

In some organisations data may be anonymised e.g. to avoid actual or perceived violation of an individual's right of privacy.

Occupancy data may be used to give managers a representation of the usage of given rooms or spaces in the building, e.g. to establish which parts are well used, which might benefit from expansion and which are under-used and might productively be re-purposed. It can be used to detect and anticipate patterns of behaviour. It may inform decisions about purchase, sale and letting of building space and in that way can have a major impact on the costs of a business.

Occupancy data may be used in relation to compliance with regulations, e.g. in establishing whether fire regulations controlling the density of occupancy have been complied with. In the event of a fire, it may be used to establish a list of building occupants for a roll call, or to confirm that all occupants have exited the building.

The data may be discretised based on a known plan of the building 50. For example the analytics engine 72 may contain a database mapping location coordinates to rooms in the building, by which means it can establish occupancy of individual rooms and establish which room a person 52 is in at a given time. The space in the building 50 may be further broken down e.g. by allocating a certain space to each desk or workstation, so that a record can be maintained of which of them is occupied.

Some uses of the data are non-real time, being based on data acquired over a protracted period. Others are real time and facilitate day to day usage of the building's facilities. Thus for example the system illustrated in Figure 3 has a space scheduling and wayfinding facility 76. Based on real time occupancy data and taking account where necessary of booking or other information about usage of a building's facilities, the scheduling facility is used to allocate space to a person, group of persons, or to an activity (such as a meeting).

The wayfinding facility is used to provide persons with directions to a chosen location in a building. This may be done based on real time data giving the location of the person being guided. Directions may be provided through a networked device such as a mobile phone or tablet running a suitable application.

Other real time uses for occupancy data include the provision of a virtual concierge service. This is especially suited to visitors or newcomers to the building. For example a visitor may be provided upon entry or in advance of a visit - with a beacon 54. This enables the visitor to be recognised in the building, and enables computer controlled systems to provide the visitor with service and/or an experience which is tailored to the individual. Thus, as the individual enters the building (s)he may be recognised by virtue of the tag's identifier, the location of the individual also being tracked. As the individual approaches reception, for example, a screen there may display a welcome message, and directions to a meeting room. Further directions may be provided in other screens in the building, or by means of an app on the user's phone or other portable device.

The architecture used to provide location-based services to a user's portable computing device is depicted in Figure 5. User 52 carries beacon 54 and the portable computing device 66, which may take the form of a mobile phone (cell phone), tablet, laptop or any other portable processing device with a suitable user interface (and the word portable must be understood herein to include wearable, so that the device could for example be a smart watch, smart glasses etc.). The beacon 54 outputs the beacon signal 56 which is received by the building-mounted receivers 60. Resultant beacon signal data is supplied via network 59 to the computer system 58. The network 59 may take any suitable form but is the internet in the present embodiment. The location engine 70 ofthe computer system 58 receives the beacon signal data and determines the location in the building of the user 52. The user location is supplied to a location-based services function 78. This function controls the location-based services to be supplied to the user 52. Such services may be supplied through either or both of (a) the user's portable computing device 66 and (b) other networked computing devices in the building, such as fixed computer-controlled screens mounted in the building. Data and instructions directed to the user's portable computing device 66 may be supplied via a network 59a, which again may take any suitable form but is the internet in the present embodiment, to the device 66 itself. The portable computing device 66 may run an app dedicated to provision of location-based services such as wayfinding, communications with a human operative, and so on. While the beacon 54 and the portable computing device 66 are depicted as separate units, their functions may in other embodiments be carried out by a single suitably programmed unit. Thus an app running on a portable computing device may cause that device to transmit the beacon signal including the identifier, as well as providing the user with the location-based services.

The computer system 58 maintains (a) a user database in which user identities are associated with beacon identifiers, so that the system is able to identify particular users from the signals given out by the beacons they carry, and (b) a contact database in which contact data for specific users is stored in association with user identities, enabling data to be pushed to the portable computing devices carried by specific users.

The architectures depicted in Figures 3 and 5 enables a service provider to implement the present invention through a subscription service, such as a website. The computer system 58 can be implemented and controlled by the service provider, with access to it being made through a website. This potentially yields data for individual subscribers about their own building usage but data relating to multiple client organisations/buildings can also be analysed by the service provider to obtain information and insights of potentially general utility.

The computer system 58 is depicted as a single unit but it will be apparent to the skilled person that it may be implemented in any of a wide range of different ways. It may indeed be formed as a single processor unit, but the relevant functions may be provided through a set of networked processing units, or through a distributed processing environment, or in the cloud.

The present invention may be embodied in whole or in part as a machine configured to receive a computer-readable medium storing computer-readable instructions. The computer-readable medium can be stored on any suitable computer readable media such as RAMs, ROMs, flash memory, EEPROMs, optical devices (CD or DVD), hard drives, floppy drives, or any suitable device. The computer-executable component can be a processor, though any suitable dedicated hardware device can (alternatively or additionally) execute the instructions.

The embodiments depicted herein are to be understood to be illustrative rather than limiting. The invention claimed may be implemented using a range of different current or future technologies. Changes can be made to the embodiments of the invention without departing from the scope of this invention as defined in the following claims

Claims

1. A system for monitoring building occupancy comprising:

portable beacons to be carried by persons in the building, each beacon being configured to periodically transmit an electromagnetic beacon signal;

receivers which are for mounting at fixed locations in an area of a building to be monitored and are configured to receive the beacon signals of the portable beacons, outputting resultant signal data; and a computer system configured to receive signal data from the receivers and to determine from the signal data physical locations of the portable beacons.

2. A system as claimed in claim 2 in which the beacon signal conforms to a Bluetooth standard.

3. A system as claimed in claim 1 or claim 2 in which each of the portable beacons is configured to include an identifier in the beacon signal, individual beacons having different identifiers.

4. A system as claimed in claim 3 which is configured to demultiplex the beacon signals from multiple beacons using the identifiers.

5. A system as claimed in any preceding claim in which the signal data provided by a receiver comprises the identifier of the beacon signal in association with an indication of the received signal strength.

6. A system as claimed in claim 5 in which the computer system determines the location of the portable beacons by trilateration based on the signal strengths received by multiple receivers from that beacon.

7. A system as claimed in claim 6 in which determination of the location of the beacon comprises receiving multiple beacon signals from the beacon over a period of time at a receiver and determining from the received signal strengths of the multiple beacon signals a single value representative of received signal strength over the said period of time.

8. A system as claimed in claim 7 in which the received signal strengths are broken down into ranges and the said single value is determined based upon the most frequently occurring signal strength range during the said period of time.

9. A system as claimed in any preceding claim in which values representing the physical locations of the portable beacons are low pass filtered to reduce noise.

10. A system as claimed in any preceding claim in which beacons implement a carrier sense multiple access strategy to enable multiple beacons to operate in a given volume without conflict.

11. A building provided with a system as claimed in any preceding claim in which at least some of the receivers are mounted in a ceiling.

12. A building as claimed in claim 11 in which said receivers are mounted in a grid pattern in the ceiling.

13. A building as claimed in claim 11 or claim 12 in which said receivers are mounted on the underside of ceiling tiles, hard wiring connecting said receivers being led through a ceiling cavity.

14. A system as claimed in any of claims 1 to 10 in which the computer system receives the signal data via a network.

15. A system as claimed in any preceding claim in which the computer system receives the signal data via the internet.

16. A system as claimed in any preceding claim in which the computer system implements a wayfinding function which provides a person with wayfinding instructions based on the determined physical location of the person's beacon, to guide the person to a destination in the building.

17. A system as claimed in any preceding claim in which the computer system provides a scheduling function in which resources in the building are allocated to users taking account of building occupancy determined from the determined physical locations of the beacons.

18. A system as claimed in claim 16 when dependent on claim 17 in which the wayfinding and scheduling functions are integrated such that in response to a resource request a user is allocated a suitable resource and guided to it.

19. A system as claimed in any of claims 16 to 18 in which the computer system is configured to communicate with the user by means of data transmitted wirelessly to a portable computing device carried by the user.

20. A building comprising a system as claimed in any of claims 1 to 10 or 14 to 19, further comprising screens mounted in the building to display content which is selected or controlled based on the determined physical locations of the beacons.

21. A building comprising a system as claimed in any of claims 1 to 10 or 14 to 19 in which the computer system is configured to control functions of the building in response to the determined physical locations of the buildings.

22. A system as claimed in any preceding claim in which the beacons are configured to stop sending the beacon signal when the beacon is removed from the building.

23. A system for providing users of a building with users with location-based services through a portable digital device, the system comprising:

receivers which are for mounting at fixed locations in an area of a building to be monitored and are configured to receive the beacon signals of the portable beacons, outputting resultant signal data; and a computer system configured to receive signal data from the receivers and to determine from the signal data physical locations ofthe portable beacons;

wherein each beacon is configured to transmit a beacon signal incorporating an identifier which is unique to that beacon, and the computer system maintains a user database in which the identifiers are associated with users, so that the computer system is able to determine from the beacon signal the identity of the user carrying the corresponding beacon;

the computer system is further configured to demultiplex received signal data based on the identifiers in the beacon signals, thereby to identify signal data associated with specific beacons;

the computer system is further configured to process signal data associated with a specific beacon to determine the physical location of the beacon, and by use of the said user database to determine the physical location of the user associated with that beacon;

the computer system is further configured to provide a contact database of contact data for a group of users enabling information to be transmitted to respective portable digital devices associated with those users;

the computer system is configured to select information for transmission to users based on their physical locations, and to transmit the selected information to the users by means of the contact data in the contact database.

24. A method of monitoring building occupancy comprising:

providing persons in the building with portable beacons to be carried on their person, each beacon transmitting an electromagnetic beacon signal;

receiving the beacon signals at receivers which are mounted at fixed locations in an area of the building, the receivers outputting resultant signal data; and receiving the signal data from the receivers at a computer system and to determining from the signal data physical locations of the portable beacons.

Intellectual

Property

Office

Application No: GB1701464.8 Examiner: Mr Christopher Kent