Low cost embedded system for increasing retail environment intelligence

The success of pervasive smart environments lies in the capacity to involve visitors to interact with them. It is essential for retail stores. In this paper we describe the setting-up of a low cost system for the indoor localization and customer interaction, developed with a complex infrastructure of wireless embedded sensors. The creation of a responsive store allows customers to connect the real world to their smart devices and will overcome the lack of ubiquity in public spaces; furthermore, from in-venue analytics and proximity sensor it is possible to customize the user experience. First of all we describe the whole sensor network. We go in deep into the active beacon technology adopted for this study. Then, thanks to the analytics, we present a data evaluation with the aim of determining the best sensor arrangement, according to several user tests. Beside the strong enhancement of human interaction, the results of our essay demonstrate how embedded localization systems could be a useful source for data collection beside the strong enhancement of human interaction. This paper is focused to help retailers and insiders for many purposes such as products development or improvement, segmentation strategies and human behaviour analyses into such stores where the embedded computing augment the environment.