Improving productivity of the food and beverage (F&B) industry using Apple i-Beacon

Abstract

Traditional food and beverage industry is having difficult situations in the competitive marketplace, because of the digital and technological innovation, pandemic situations and consumers' taste. In these days, consumers want to take extra care of their health so that they can resist the diseases in the pandemic situations and stay healthy and diet lifestyle. They want to more know about the food and ingredient that they are going to eat. The project's aim is to design an Android mobile application that can work with iBeacons to improve productivity of Food and Beverage industry. iBeacon is the type of Bluetooth beacon that use Apple’s technology standard to allow IOS and android mobile apps to detect signals in the world and response accordingly. The iBeacon use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to transmit signals with lower battery consumptions and contains a small amount of data, that consist of advertisements, menus, health tips etc., to inform the user. The main work is to develop an android app that can detect signals from iBeacons that are located in three different places: entrance, canteen and fruit juice bar, and get information such as health tips, meal promotions, etc from them. The app is developed by using Android Studio Platform, a programming platform that can develop various kinds of android mobile apps using Java and Kotlin languages. The app will then linked together with Estimote Cloud to use Basic Authentication and perform the suitable features. To summarize, the mobile application has been developed and practically demonstrated.