Enhancing a mobile application with contextual information delivery using proximity beacon: a preliminary study at a tourist destination

This paper presents the development of a mobile application with contextual information delivery using proximity beacon. The aim of this study is to help the tourism industry in attracting more visitors. To execute the functions, a prototype was developed and based at Melaka Zoo, Malaysia. There are two mobile technologies used in the development of the prototype namely geofence and proximity beacon using Bluetooth. There are three phases involved in developing the prototype; feasibility study and requirement analysis, design, and development and testing. The functionality and the network performance of the developed application was successfully tested and validated. All designed and developed functions of the application were working correctly. In addition, the network performance of geofence and beacon were acceptable. Further work is recommended to ensure that the application can be applied successfully in other domains such as smart campus, smart home and smart mall applications. Besides, the development can be extended to the iOS platform.