A bluetooth-based Interactive system to improve relationships between actors in educational environments

Nowadays there are a vast number of devices and technologies available for the common citizen to improve their communication with others. This fosters the design and implementation of systems that explore the available features of these devices. In this paper, we propose a Bluetooth-based interactive system for delivering personalized information in high education institutions. The system allows informing, on a personalized way, the actors of an education institution on a free way using popular communication standards. The scenario we promote in the paper is mainly focused on learning environments, however the framework is also applicable in other shared public and semi-public spaces such as offices, homes, companies and many others. One of the most important contributions of this work is to combine public displays and personal mobile devices for delivering personalized information according to the students’ location. A prototype has been built and discussed with demonstrative user scenarios. Early results show that teachers and students found some advantages in this system comparing to traditional approaches. This system can effectively support a wide range of activities for students. It provides to each student the possibility to have a personal interaction with the technology in an authentic and appropriate use context. Features like the system’s architecture, prototype and system’s evaluation are explained in the paper. Results show that this system can be an important complement to other popular systems in education environment (e.g. e-mail, chats, Wikis, forums, e-learning platforms etc.)