Abstract
People often have to stand waiting in a queue, which they may find disagreeable. Facilities where people must wait, for example, food courts, banks and amusement parks, need to recognize and provide an estimated wait time to increase customer satisfaction. Hence, there is demand for wait time estimation methods. Also, the requirement for estimation accuracy changes with the length of the queue. In this paper, we propose a cooperative line wait time estimation method using Bluetooth low energy (BLE, marketed as Bluetooth Smart) on a smartphone. To estimate the wait time, we utilize the stay-times of users approaching and moving past two preinstalled receivers. The wait time is estimated by the difference between the two stay-times. Our stay-time estimation includes two methods: a direct-wave blocking method and a stay-time estimation method. We experimentally evaluated with our method in a passageway of our university campus for different values of the range value which is a parameter used in the stay-time estimation. It was found that when the range value was set to 4-8 dB, almost all of the devices estimated the wait time to be within 20 s of from the expected wait time. This result satisfied the requirement of all users according to our questionnaire about discontent with erroneously estimated wait times.
