Abstract

Playground safety for preschool and early elementary school children has become an increasingly important issue for families and local communities. In semi-open playground environments, direct supervision by caregivers is often difficult, while conventional positioning approaches may be costly, infrastructure-dependent, or unreliable due to frequent signal obstructions. This study presents an integrated low-cost monitoring system that combines commercial BLE beacons, a single smart device installed in the playground, a push-notification server, and a caregiver smartphone application to detect children’s entrance and exit events and visualize their playground usage logs. Rather than proposing a new localization algorithm, the main contribution of this work is the practical system integration and field validation of BLE-based entrance/exit detection in semi-open playground settings. The smart device continuously scans beacon RSSI values, applies Kalman-filter-based smoothing and threshold-based state transitions, and transmits detected events to the server, where daily, weekly, and monthly statistics are generated and visualized for caregivers. Field experiments conducted at five real playgrounds showed that the proposed system achieved over 99% entrance/exit detection accuracy with an average response time of less than 7 s. These results demonstrate that reliable playground entry/exit monitoring can be implemented at low cost, with simple infrastructure and practical deployment in residential environments.

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