Today we're releasing an experiment called Prox. It's a simple, serverless native app that can be useful to pilot the functionality of iBeacons as they're currently implemented on iOS. We built prox to help researchers create small experiments, whereby they could set up individual smartphones to observe any number of Estimote beacons, collect that data, and decide for themselves how beacons might be meaningful for their research.
There are two modes for prox, but most of the functionality is hidden behind an admin password after setup.
It's open source, and free. We'll soon be adding an app-store preconfigured version but for anyone interested today please get in touch.
We developed this iOS app, and ran a small pilot study along with the Designing Health lab at ASU, headed by Dr. Eric Hekler. Lots of credit as well to Sayali Phatak and Elizabeth Korinek for their work putting the protocols together and the experiment in to action.
Prox is a small agile experiment created by Fitabase and Arizona State University's Designing Health Lab. It was funded by the Health Data Exploration Project (http://hdexplore.calit2.net/), with generous funding by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (http://www.rwjf.org).
Want to learn more? Have ideas for proximity sensors? Please get in touch!