Challenges to building Bluetooth-based sensing solutions

Emerging context aware applications call for new networking technologies to enable rapid development of integrated solutions that gather, process and store context from a diverse set of sensors. We examine Bluetooth in the context of enabling emerging classes of context aware applications, such as healthcare, fitness, gaming, etc., using off-the-shelf (OTS) products. While Bluetooth is widely used today, its applicability to this new class of applications is not widely understood and applications that use Bluetooth could suffer from inconsistent usages and poor performance as a result. We investigate and report the challenges of implementing solutions that use software and OTS products based on existing Bluetooth standards. We also present performance analysis through experimentations to highlight some of the issues discussed in the paper. Based on our experience from building Bluetooth based sensing solutions, we make informed recommendations for modifications in the Bluetooth standard and highlight areas where new standards are required.