New Tools for Studying Visitor Behaviours in Museums: A Case Study at the Louvre

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the exploitation of data originated from Bluetooth-enabled devices to understand visitor's behaviour in the Louvre museum in Paris, France. The collected samples are analysed to examine frequent patterns in visitor's behaviours, their trajectory, length of stay and some relationships, offering new details on behaviour than previously available. Our work reinforces the emergence of a new methodology to study visitors. It is part of recent lines of investigation that exploit the presence of pervasive data networks to complement more traditional methods in tourism studies, such as surveys based on observation or interviews. However, most past experiments have explored quantitative data coming from mobile phones, GPS, or even geotagged user generated content to understand behaviour in a region, or a city, at a larger scale than that of our current work.

Analysis of pedestrian behaviors through non-invasive Bluetooth monitoring

“…This makes use of people's unconsciously left digital footprints or "data exhaust" (Mayer-Schönberger & Cukier, 2013, page 113). The Bluetooth detection technique can be classified as a passive data collection technique, which is in contrast to the active data collection (see a review of data collection classification in Yoshimura et al, 2012Yoshimura et al, , 2014. The following are the advantages of Bluetooth detection technique compared with other existing methods for the analysis of shopping behaviors.…”

Interacting with Heritage: On the Use and Potential of IoT Within the Cultural Heritage Sector

“…To do this they require information about what visitors do onsite, and what parts of the exhibition they like or dislike. Traditionally, such information is gathered using techniques such as observations and interviews [38]. However, such methods are costly both in terms of time and money, and the results can be somewhat subjective [39].…”

Conducting Visitor Studies Using Smartphone-Based Location Sensing

“…A system that employs Bluetooth was installed at the Louvre in France during 2011 (Yoshimura et al 2012) allowing the capture of a relatively short sequence of visitor sightings at demarcated locations used to reconstruct visitor flows and identify distinct itineraries. At the lowest end of the accuracy and cost spectrum, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been employed in a case study conducted at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (Hsi and Fait 2005) revealing interesting patterns in the pathways followed by individuals and groups.…”