Despite being in its 21st year the market for
Bluetooth continues to grow. To put it in perspective in 2000, there were a
total of 800,000 Bluetooth enabled devices shipped in a single year. Today,
it’s 10million per day. Martin Woolley, Developer Relations Manager EMEA at the
Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the official standards organisation for
the wireless communication technology, suggests that Bluetooth’s survival and
popularity is owed to its clever evolution that has made it applicable to new
and relevant use cases. Now there are three Bluetooth technologies, but
arguably the biggest milestone emerged 8 years ago with the release of
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
BLE allows for super-efficient, wireless devices -
and paved the way for applications that were previously not conceivable. For
example, the smart home relies on battery-powered sensors hidden in
non-accessible places. With the introduction of BLE radio, the community also
sought to address the market opportunity for standardised, lower-cost location
services solutions. With forecasts anticipating more than 400m products
shipping per year by 2022, it appears it’s been successful in achieving that
goal.
The location technology generally falls into two
categories - proximity and positioning. These use the BLE radio to determine if
two Bluetooth devices are in range of each other and, in many cases, use
received signal strength (RSSI) measurements to estimate the distance between
the two devices. With proximity solutions, one Bluetooth device is used to
determine if another Bluetooth device is within range and how far away it is.
Point of interest (PoI) information and item finding are two popular types of
use case. As for the future, Woolley said that “the community never sits
still”. He pointed to next generation Bluetooth audio as the technology’s
ensuing innovation.
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