Peer Reviewed Journal via three different mandatory reviewing processes, since 2006, and, from September 2020, a fourth mandatory peer-editing has been added.
Information gathering system is focused to manage service
status in public transportation. Smartphones are first candi-
date devices for this purpose because they have an internet
connection through a cellular network. Participatory sensing
methods, where many common people collaborate to collect
information on their own smartphone, have been focused on
information gathering. A sensing system requests participants
to collect demanded information. On the contrary, they may not
be enough to collect information continuously because ordinary
people may not exist in a service area.
This paper proposes a collaborative mechanism with BLE
devices with sensors and smartphones to realize the information
gathering system. The proposed mechanism employs Bluetooth
Low Energy (BLE) devices as a beacon device that triggers our
special application for smartphones. BLE devices also store
demanded information with sensors. The special application
can be automatically launched when a beacon message arrives
on the smartphone and can obtain the demanded information
from the BLE device. The benefit of the proposed system is
a hands-free operation of the smartphone application because
the information gathering process is performed in a background
process. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed
application can measure its position with a GPS receiver and
can upload the obtained location to the cloud automatically.
