Finding the sweet spot for your sensors is a challenge in many IoT projects. Collect too little data, and there isn’t enough to act on. Collect too much data, and the costs might jeopardize your project. So, where is the sweet spot for your application?
Goal
A retail store chain was looking for an affordable retail analytics system. It needed to track people’s movements to help improve the store layout and learn more about customers’ shopping behavior. The solution had to be easy to deploy, be discreet and not require any changes from shoppers. The solution was designed on the fact that most shoppers would have mobile phones, which could be used as an approximate count for the number of people in the store and could also help track their movements as they moved from one Wi-Fi hotspot to another.
A “People Sensor” was designed using the principle that mobile phones share their MAC address with Wi-Fi hotspots as part of the “handshake process” in order to obtain connectivity. ( MAC addresses are not associated with a specific individual or a mobile phone number, helping to preserve privacy. ) The sensor was built by modifying the firmware in low-cost Wi-Fi routers to count the number of MAC addresses from phones in the vicinity requesting connectivity and then send this information to the cloud for analysis. The People Sensor works in conjunction with existing Wi-Fi routers in the store, which provide shoppers with Wi-Fi connectivity and also the means to send sensor data to the cloud.
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