The Beacon South Tyrol Mobile Guide

The Beacon Südtirol – Alto Adige project (https://beacon.bz.it/project/) is developing a hardware and software Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure for South Tyrol Province. The project is currently deploying 3.500 beacons, small Bluetooth devices that, by providing a unique identifier, enable the development of mobile applications which can offer localized and contextual services. The developed infrastructure, which will be available as open source, can be used to develop added value services for the region. Within this context, Suggesto, in collaboration with IDM Südtirol – Alto Adige, NOI Techpark and the Computer Science Faculty of Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, is extending the South Tyrol Mobile Guide official app to provide to the users contextual information and personalized recommendations for point of interests to visit or activities to practice (https://beacon.bz.it/wp-6/beaconrecommender/). Beacons enable the application to precisely localize the user both indoor and outdoor. Users in proximity of a point of interest (POI) can receive information about the POI or suggestions for other nearby POIs to visit. Innovative recommendation algorithms exploit the user’s observed behavior and position to compute personalized suggestions for relevant point of interests. The app is now under evaluation on some selected case studies. During the talk, we will present the scenarios which are supported, their implications and possible extensions; we will provide an overview of the implemented recommendation algorithms and illustrate the software architecture which has been designed to integrate the beacon technologies and the recommendation algorithm in the existing architecture. We will also present the first results of the user evaluations on the selected case studies.