4 Ways Beacons ensure You lead a Smart Life

With the advent of IoT and beacons the lines between our physical and digital worlds are now fast blurring. Having been actively involved in pushing the IoT barrier, beacons will continue to impact almost every aspect of our daily lives as days go by. In fact, according to a recent Business Insider report, by 2019, the Internet of Things (IoT) market will be more than twice the size of the tablet, smartphone, PC, connected car and wearable market combined. So much so that the Internet of Things market is expected to add $1.7 trillion in value to the global economy.

[Tweet “The Internet of Things market will add $1.7 trillion in value to the global economy by 2019”]

While businesses across various verticals, are shifting fast from trialling beacons to deploying them on a large scale, few brands have come up with innovative implementations that simplify our daily lives. In this post, we will discuss four such examples, where beacons are being leveraged to enhance daily life experiences.

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1. Carrot Hunger app – Helps you watch your diet

Image Source: gigaom.com

This free, calorie counting app takes a new approach to Bluetooth Low Energy protocol by employing beacons to help you eat less. All you have to do is stick a beacon on your fridge and the Carrot Hunger app will push a notification whenever you are near the refrigerator reminding you to log the food you’re about to eat.

Image Source: gigaom.com

To configure the beacon, you will just have to add the UUID of your beacon to the Carrot Hunger app and employ a bit of trial and error to figure out the best place to stick the beacon on or around a fridge.

[Tweet “How Carrot Hunger app leverages beacons to help you eat less”]

Apart from its fridge alarm feature, the app even allows you to scan a barcode to enter the food you have just eaten. You can also manually enter the calories consumed by you from a database of foods. Further, if you happen to overindulge and cross your daily food allotment, the Carrot Hunger app will punish you — either by serving full screen in-app ads, asking for an in-app payment or by posting about your failure on social networks.

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2. Elevate app – Helps you monitor your productivity

This app was developed by our in-house iOS engineer using the Beaconstac SDK. The Elevate app allows you to track and monitor time spent on daily activities by tagging each beacon to a particular activity say, watching TV at home, working at your office desk, working out at the gym etc. This can be done by configuring a beacon on the app by mentioning the name of the activity it is tagged to, and other beacon credentials such as UUID, Major ID and Minor ID.

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You can even configure Apple’s iWatch to act as a beacon and use the Elevate app to track the amount of time you spent jogging. Once you have added a beacon to the Elevate app, the timer will pause whenever you move out of the 5 feet radius of the beacon and will start ticking again once you are back in range. This data is then collected and represented in the form of graphs to give you a better idea on how to improve your productivity and allocate time better for your favourite activities.

You can check out Elevate app on Bitbucket here.

[Tweet “Elevate, a productivity app built using the Beaconstac SDK – bitbucket.org/garima/elevate”]

3. Woolet – Reminds you if you leave your wallet behind

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The Woolet is a slim wallet that comes with a small beacon that connects to your phone. It leverages iBeacon technology to notify you when you leave (or lose) your wallet behind, by causing your phone to buzz. More interestingly, the Woolet also comes with a small built in buzzer that will notify you if you leave the house without your phone.

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4. Automatic Link smart driving assistant – Helps with granular car location tracking

Image Source: appleinsider.com

Automatic Link, is an automotive accessory that, when plugged into a car’s on-board diagnostics (OBD) port helps monitor various metrics like vehicle speed, fuel level and error reports. You can also pair Automatic Link with your iPhone to get a detailed breakdown of each car ride, by allowing it to access the GPS module and wireless data network. This allows Automatic Link to easily learn about your driving habits and provide recommendations on how you can become a more efficient driver.

[Tweet “How Automatic Link uses beacons to help with remote payments”]

With the recent update, Automatic Link can now use its built-in Bluetooth 4.0 capability to transmit and receive information within Apple’s iBeacon ecosystem. This allows Automatic Link to provide offerings such as automatic toll or gas payments, automatic check-ins etc.

Are there any other innovative beacon implementations that you think we have missed out on? Let us know in the comments below.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!