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Can you use the variation of RSSI to track movement? I know thst it's multipath and cannot be really reliable, but maybe it can provide some useful information. Or maybe using 2 tracking devices and correlate the results.

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I do something like that for my home assistant: I have a few shelly smart plugs that can scan BLE. They filter for apple watches and send the MAC and RSSI to my home assistant where a small neural net then tries to detect the location within my apartment. It works better than I expected given the high variance of signal strength, even when standing still.

Instead of triangulation like that, which could get real complicated, you could also simply place enough in the areas you’re counting and limit the RSSI cut-off enough to measure those right next to it. That would work for specific areas you want to measure trends in, instead of general 3d spatial triangulation.

though some of the papers I read did this via measuring the time of flight of BT packets and how they were changed when people walked between them, and that really blew my mind!

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