Various efforts are being made around the world to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infections. In this paper, we propose a monitoring system for estimating degrees of congestion on university campuses. In our system, we assume persons entering the university campus have a smartphone with the COVID-19 Contact Confirming Application app or a BLE beacon distributed at the campus gate. Monitoring devices are installed at various areas on campus to collect BLE advertising packets broadcasted by smartphones or BLE beacons. The information is sent through a campus-wide Wi-Fi network to a monitoring server, which estimates the congestion degree for each area and shows the results to university staff and students. We implement the monitoring device using Raspberry Pi 4 and conduct laboratory experiments to confirm basic system performance.
A BLE-based Monitoring System for Estimating Congestion on University Campuses