Most people use Bluetooth to either connect to an audio device such as earphones or to share files across two devices in close proximity. Over the past few years, the use of Bluetooth has evolved from these two and in some cases, Bluetooth has been used for location tracking with the most popular use being through tags that people place on items they frequently lose.

The body behind the Bluetooth standard, Bluetooth Special Interest Group, has announced a new feature in the upcoming Bluetooth version 5.1. The new feature improves the location capabilities of Bluetooth, making it possible to locate a device with an accuracy of a few centimetres.

Previously, Bluetooth location services could only tell how far two devices are from each other by measuring their signal strength but this new feature adds a directional capability thus making tracking even more accurate which would be useful in property tracking tags as it would now be able to not only alert the owner that their lost property is nearby but which direction it is.

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It is not the first time that Bluetooth has been used for location tracking, especially for indoor positioning systems which have always had a meter-level accuracy, the new directional improvement will also shed this accuracy down to centimetre-level.

Gadgets Africa’s Take:

The new location tracking features are bound to spike growth in the number of startups that offer tags to easily locate your items. Let’s hope that they don’t we, in Africa, will have our own fair share of such items because I am tired of losing my remotes and socks.