John Norman, UIS
Are ideas with hardware in scope? A recent BBC Click programme reported cheap sensors for people entering and leaving rooms. The way they said it suggested it picked up mobile phone signatures. The idea that you might be able to cheaply count the mobile phones in the room is intriguing from several perspectives, not least to do with audience polling. But it could also be a useful proxy for occupancy in our room utilisation problem. I can’t remember the price at which Steve Young said he would want to equip all teaching rooms, but I have £100 in my head. We have something in the order of 500-600 teaching rooms so that would be £50-60K which sounds reasonable.
Would designing and building a prototype system be a CL project or should it be something for Engineering..?
One of the teams did something related last year ...
https://wiki.cam.ac.uk/cl-design-projects/Location-based_teaching
We might be able to use that infrastructure for a utilisation project, but would need to extend it with enough functionality to provide things for different members of the team to do.
Not quite the concept I had in mind as the beacon is passive and the phone app does the work (and holds the data). The main challenge for this concept in the context of my room occupancy goal would be to create the app that used the beacon and which all students and staff would want to install, then get permission to collect location data.
One idea might be a cell phone signal booster like this: http://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Airave-Airvana-Version-reception/dp/B00B18LKU4
You could then record how many unique connections you pick up. There is probably a better idea. I don’t know enough about how phones pick up mobile masts. Essentially you would be ‘sniffing’ for an active mobile phone. Of course you would need to let people know you were doing this and they would have the option of switching their phones off.
I guess another possibility would be to use Eduroam registrations - if I remember correctly, there is quite a lot of data exchanged with the local access point. Are you familiar with what this is?
(It would assume that the mobile devices are using WiFi, but this is a reasonable constraint for building a demonstrator - it’s much easier for us to get access to WiFi traffic than GSM traffic)
