BLE Device FAQ

1. Question: What happens if I have two or more mobile phones in close contact with a BLE device associated with a piece of equipment? How does it differentiate which device should be tracked and logged with that BLE?

Answer: As the BLE signals are received and recorded, the server recalculates every 15 minutes and determines the machine operating period, the operator, and the location. 

• Throughout the day on the jobsite, BLE readings will be picked up by several workers, as they walk or drive by the equipment it’s associated with.  The server will review this and take it into account to determine which operator is actually operating the equipment. This is accomplished through several factors:
  • Signal strength
  • Duration of repeated readings from the same BLE/Equipment.  
  • Filters and removes other readings as “noise” and correctly isolates the correct user as the operator.

2. Question: What is the distance the BLE should start and stop tracking?

Answer: This depends on the type of mobile device.  Android: Will pick up the device within 10-20 feet. This depends on the location of the BLE beacon within the equipment.  The system will only use readings that have a certain level of signal strength.  iOS: Will pick up the device within 10-15 feet.  The iPhone will tell the system whether the BLE beacon is “Found” or “Lost” as it goes in and out of range.   

• Remember: As mentioned in Question 2, we use a variety of algorithms to determine whether the user was operating the equipment based on these readings and are able to correctly determine the operating time even if the readings fluctuate throughout the operating period.

3. Question: What is the data usage a user can expect for SC Field from a device for:

• • Project manager/Forman usage
  • Team leader/Leading hand (time and photos, material logging, BLE Tracking, Progress reporting)
  • Operator (time and photos, material logging, BLE Tracking)
  • Labourer (just time entry)

Answer: BLE Tracking/Time Entry/SiteLog/Daily Report entry: The amount is negligible as the amount of data is relatively small. These should not make any noticeable impact on the users’ data usage.

Photos/video/attachments that are downloaded/uploaded are the only appreciable data usage that occurs.  This can be done from various parts of the Field app.   When photos are taken and uploaded, we compress the photo to a much smaller size before transmitting to the server (from 5-15megs down to 100-300k). 

For videos, encoding and compression is much more intensive, so we have to send the raw video to the server, which will then reduce the video to be up to 100 times smaller.  (For example, a 100-megabyte video might be compressed to 1-5 megabytes).

It’s important to point out that video upload will use more data when uploaded by the user, but much less data when viewed later by other users.