Capturing the Behaviour of Volunteer Pedestrians in a Newly-Developed University Campus Using a Distributed Array of Bluetooth Low Energy Devices

Contemporary public infrastructure projects emphasise sustainable options that integrate pedestrian routes, leisure facilities and convenient access to public transport systems. It is important to understand the effectiveness of these contemporary designs. In the age of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there is a need to develop technology-based solutions that collect information about the behaviour of pedestrians in public spaces as they commute and engage in leisure pursuits while simultaneously preserving the privacy of these citizens. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), has privacy-preserving features that make it worth considering as part of a technology solution for studies of this type. This work presents the preliminary results of a multi-stakeholder study that collected data via BLE from 28 volunteer pedestrians who regularly used the public domain of the newly developed Grangegorman campus in Dublin's north inner city. Before the commencement of the data collection, each volunteer completed a short questionnaire about their intended movements on the campus, and for the next three weeks, they each carried a small keyring-sized BLE beacon with them as they passed through the campus. Bluetooth received signal strength indication from these beacons was collected at 17 points around the campus over the study period. The data for the volunteers were anonymised at the point of capture by hash encoding the MAC address of the beacons. The results of the work show that BLE can be used to monitor the approximate movements of volunteer pedestrians and so provide valuable privacy-preserving data on the utilisation of public infrastructure.