The lust-introduced version of Bluetooth enables devices to sense the direction a wireless signal is coming from. The goal is to significantly improve the performance of location services.
If nothing else, this should hugely enhance Tile trackers. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is promising accuracy for personal property tags down to the centimeter.
Currently, Tile and similar solutions depend on the strength of their Bluetooth signals to judge distance. Adding direction would greatly improve their usefulness.
More location-related uses for Bluetooth 5.1
Applications for this new feature extend beyond personal property tags. There’s also point-of-interest (PoI) information solutions like proximity marketing beacons.
“Location services is one of the fastest growing solution areas for Bluetooth technology, and is forecasted to reach over 400 million products per year by 2022,” said Mark Powell, Bluetooth SIG Executive Director, in a statement.
Be patient
The direction finding feature is included in version 5.1 of the Bluetooth Core Specification, which is available to developers as of today. But it’s likely to be some time before any devices with this feature are released.
The 2018 iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR all have Bluetooth 5.0, but many accessories lag behind. Tile uses Bluetooth 4.0, for example. Still, with a significant benefit in version 5.1, makers of personal property tags now have a strong reason to develop products with the latest version.
