BlueSeer: AI-driven environment detection via BLE scans

IoT devices rely on environment detection to trigger specific actions, e.g., for headphones to adapt noise cancellation to the surroundings. While phones feature many sensors, from GNSS to cameras, small wearables must rely on the few energy-efficient components they already incorporate. In this paper, we demonstrate that a Bluetooth radio is the only component required to accurately classify environments and present BlueSeer, an environment-detection system that solely relies on received BLE packets and an embedded neural network. BlueSeer achieves an accuracy of up to 84% differentiating between 7 environments on resource-constrained devices, and requires only 12 ms for inference on a 64 MHz microcontroller-unit.