About BLEAT

WHAT IS BLEAT?

BLEAT is an indoor localisation and tracking system for objects and people for the purposes of productivity improvement, advanced health and safety, and unprecedented knowledge of infrastructure utilisation through analytics.

BLEAT is a first of its kind system, leveraging Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for ON DEVICE location tracking and relaying location through battery powered BLE-LoRaWAN enabled beacons (BLEAcons). This enables devices to compute and use their own location and communicate information through to the cloud even in environments where there may be no GPS, cellular or WiFi available.

BLEAT is capable of delivering useful (room-level) location accuracy throughout various infrastructure, offering:

  • Reduction in time lost locating objects and people.

    BLEAT applied to utilisation tracking of a scissor lift in an industrial site.

  • Advanced knowledge of people remaining during evacuations.
  • Real-time alerting to staff and customers of  location specific hazards.
  • Real-time infrastructure insights to optimise planning, maintenance, cleaning, construction work, etc.

In addition to real-time localisation of objects, BLEAT offers a novel language to describe the state of nearby objects and other contextual information that can be used to produce notification, alarms and other autonomous tasks.

Key features of BLEAT:

  • Low cost, low maintenance, long-term solution
  • Localisation on the BLETags (tracking devices)
  • Low power BLE device easily attachable to objects, people and different materials
  • Novel IoT protocol for context awareness

BLEAT employs a proprietary BLE-localisation IoT algorithm and BLEAT tracking platforms (BLEATag and BLEAcons). It is protected by a patent family for the invention developed by CSIRO’s Data61 Distributed Sensing Systems Group, which is currently licensed to Ynomia.

 

HOW DOES BLEAT WORK?

BLEAT is a scalable, easy to deploy solution offering a low barrier to adoption.

CSIRO BLEATag (Tracking Tag)

  • BLEATags (tracking devices) localise themselves by fusing location information broadcasted from low power infrastructure beacons (BLEAcons), distributed throughout an indoor environment.
  • Data from BLEATags is communicated to the BLEAcons via a proprietary BLE encoded and encrypted packet.
  • The BLEAcon relays the data to a gateway via LoRaWAN, which in turn forwards the packet to the cloud server for real-time localisation of the tracked subject or for insightful analytics.

Exceptionally low power (typical 5uA when not moving), the BLETags have an accelerometer, NFC, LEDs and a buzzer to easily attached to the subject to be tracked.

The BLEAcons feature both BLE and LoRa radios, allowing BLE packets to be beaconed to the BLEATags (for localisation) as well as forwarding received locations from tags back to a LoRaWAN gateway in a low power manner.

CSIRO BLEAcon (Infrastructure Beacon)

The system provides useful, real-time tracking with as little as a few beacons, or alternatively, the beacon network can be grown as needed to meet the accuracy, coverage and functionality regardless of the size of the site.

BLEAcons can be rapidly deployed because they are battery powered (untethered). This means companies can be tracking objects and achieving efficiencies on the same day beacons are deployed.

Additional CSIRO technologies can be used atop of BLEAT to enable devices to share geo-located object state information through a novel IoT “language” (EI OTI), sharing of time-stamped  sensor data (EI TDF), processing of shared data by compact virtual machine code representing rules (EI VM) and over the air reprogramming and reconfiguring (EI RPC).

 

WHO IS BLEAT FOR?

Potential users to benefit from this tracking system include:

  • Construction companies
  • Supermarkets 
  • Households (pets, kids, car keys) 
  • Wildlife tracking and research 
  • Hospitals
  • Mining companies (underground, open cut)
  • Site managers (private and government organisations)  
  • Health and safety firms 
  • Army bases (enhanced safety)

 

HOW DOES BLEAT COMPARE TO SIMILAR PLATFORMS?

BLEAT allows devices to locate themselves within the environment, so alerts and logic can be performed in real-time without requiring Internet access.

BLEAT infrastructure is battery powered, making it rapidly deployable. It can both send data to tracking tags (via BLE) as well as relay data from tracked tags (via LoRaWAN) to the cloud. This approach only requires BLE capability for tracking tags which allows them to be low power and capable of running for over a year on a single button cell (assuming tag average daily movement of 1 hour).

The BLEAT system is an affordable long-term solution for large-scale and real time tracking of people and objects moving throughout various infrastructure.

Awards

The BLEAT System won 2020 Good Design Award Gold! Read more…

We are open to partnerships and collaborations for research, development, and commercialisation.

Contact us to learn more.