Wearabouts is a system for indoor room-level localization of people. It detects individuals via Bluetooth Low-Energy communications from the devices they carry and determines their current location in a building. Wearabouts provides location information as a service to other systems, enabling new smart applications.

People and their devices are becoming intrinsically tied together. Smartphones already accompany their owner for the majority of the day. Wearable devices both continue and enhance this trend. The use of Bluetooth Low-Energy communications on these devices means that they all continuously broadcast their presence with advertisement packets. This allows them to serve a secondary purpose as a proxy for localizing people. We propose that non-intrusive room-level localization is possible by detecting devices that people already carry and wear.

We propose that room-level localization is possible by comparing the distribution of a series of signal strength measurements from the user's unmodified devices to the expected distribution of devices inside of the room.