Hi,
The Bluetooth SIG is on a roll right now, and the list of adopted Bluetooth low energy profiles is continuing to grow! The Bluetooth SIG maintains the official list of Bluetooth specifications at https://www.bluetooth.org/Technical/Specifications/adopted.htm. The BLE profiles are listed in the table marked "GATT-based profiles". In addition to the Health Thermometer profile I mentioned in an earlier post, we now have Find Me and Proximity profiles. In addition, we have related services such as Link Loss and TX power.
The Proximity profile is pretty big news. For those who haven't heard about it before, this profile allows you to trigger events based on a device being close or far away. Now that might not sound very exciting, but it makes it possible to solve some very common everyday problems. For example, who hasn't left their phone behind sometime, or lost a set of keys or wondered where the kids put the remote? The Proximity profile can help solve these all of these problems and more. Small devices called proximity tags can be attached or embedded in objects you want to keep track of, and then you can use your smart phone, tablet or PC to interact with them or track them. You can also use a tag to automatically lock and unlock a PC without using a password based on whether you are close to the PC or not.
Some companies have brought similar devices to market based on Bluetooth, but since the batteries only last a few days, this has severely limited the market for such devices. With BLE, such a device can be powered from a tiny coin cell that will last a year or more!
We have already made available an early version of a proximity tag for our CC2540DK-MINI, but now that the specification is done, it is possible to have it be interoperable across vendors and implementations.
Keep 'em coming!
Karl