Social location awareness: A prototype of altruistic IoT

This paper presents a prototype system, designed and developed exploiting the Internet of Things paradigm and its related technologies with altruistic purposes. In fact, the system here described involves the iBeacon technology and BLE-capable smart phones, put to good use to provide an altruistic Internet of Things (IoT) platform. In particular, we implemented a mobile application, for iOS and Android platforms, with the goal of letting the users identify and localize their personal objects, equipped with a beacon. The innovative aspect of this possession tracking system is that the smartphone application creates a social network of users, suitable in order to identify the geographical coordinates of the beacons (and so of the related personal objects) out of the owner user range, in a transparent fashion for the users involved in such a social network.