R&D&i at Wellness Telecom: Location Based Analyser

Many businesses need to understand their customers' behavior within their premises (e.g. within their shop), to answer questions such as: "How long do customers wait to get served?", "How much time does a customer spend in my shop?", "How many of the customers entering my shop visit it again (in %), and after how long do they return (on average)?"

Many methods have been previously implemented to try to answer these questions, such as: loyalty cards, computerized queue management etc. Wellness Telecom is participating on LBA project, which will provide a low-cost generic and privacy-friendly solution to this problem.

LBA uses a low cost wireless sensor network, able to locate and track Bluetooth and WIFI devices used by many mobile phones. The system locates and tracks mobile phones on the premises and uses the data to answer these and other questions, providing business intelligence solutions at a fraction of current prices. Then it is possible to know how many customers there are on a specific restaurant, the correlation between establishments or to build opening time-tables according to the people demand over the day. Moreover it is possible to incentive people to move from one point to another by means of Bluetooth messages. Our studies revealed that 80% of the customers are willing to enable their Bluetooth on the mobile phone to receive alerts about special prices, updated time-tables and general information. This allows the system to get location data of as many mobile devices as possible in a complete seamless way for the customer.

The system can be deployed in both indoor and outdoor environments, and does NOT retrieve any data with which the phone's owner may be identified. Currently the system is tested over an amusement park and retail shops in Spain, Switzerland and Singapore.