13 July, 2023

Efficient indoor positioning and BLE location injection with flespi

Facilitating development of indoor tracking solutions and integration of BLE beacons coordinates into third-party platforms.

Three reasons for writing this article

  1. Global indoor positioning and indoor navigation market is growing at a CAGR of 33% from 2021 to 2025: 

indoor positioning bluetooth

  1. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is the prevalent communication medium for indoor positioning: 

indoor navigation market

  1. One of the key drivers of the market is the rapid adoption of beacon technology. The beacon market size is expected to grow by $31B between 2022 and 2027 and register a CAGR of 58.12%. The market is driven by the increasing adoption of location-based services across industries, including retail, healthcare, hospitality, and transportation.

beacon market size growth

Realizing the accelerating dynamics on the market, we in flespi completely revised our approach to working with BLE beacons to make it more easily deployable and scalable.

Where it applies?

This approach works perfectly in any indoor cases where we need to inject the position of the nearest fixed BLE beacon into GPS tracker messages. In essence, it can be anything from tracking a forklift in a warehouse, to registering employees in an office, to finding corporate vehicles on the parking lot.

How it works?

Flespi features a special ble-indoor-position plugin that unifies the configuration of the indoor solution:

  • You define all fixed BLE beacons with their coordinates and additional attributes like floor number, room number, altitude, customer ID, etc.

  • You assign the plugin to the devices that will need to be tracked indoors.

  • The BLE position data merges into the original device messages or replaces the coordinates' data automatically. 

beacon indoor positioning api

That’s it — you can now consume the indoor positioning data from your solution via the flespi API

[Bonus] Using BLE position in third-party platforms

API is great, but what if you want the messages with replaced position data to appear in the target platforms or solutions that actually make use of them? We’ve got you covered.

Once you have the processed messages in flespi, it means you can have them in any flespi’s downstream integrations — Wialon, Mapon, Navixy, GPSWOX, GpsGate, Traccar, Key Telematics, and GPS-Trace — they all now can benefit from the BLE beacons positioning feature without any preparation on their side. You just create a stream and the data stars flowing into the target destination.

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Indoor positioning systems open new opportunities for advanced safety, better equipment and asset management, staff control, and a lot more. We are here at the forefront to support you technologically and facilitate development of the new useful solutions for the society.

With any questions or suggestions, please contact us in the chat.