Bluetooth Low Energy (also known as Bluetooth v4) is the current standard in Bluetooth Technology. It is particularly interesting to me when applied to healthcare devices, for a number of reasons:

No pairing necessary. These healthcare devices are normally handled by carers or vulnerable people who do not want to go through the hassle of pairing bluetooth devices, or entering PIN codes, etc. They just want an easy, quick connection process – BLE does this wonderfully. The BLE device acts as a server which broadcasts a number of services [1]. Different devices offer different services – for example a thermometer would advertise a “Health Thermometer” service (0x1809), and a SP02 device would advertise a “Heart Rate” service (0x180D). A BLE client (an android smartphone in this case) can scan for BLE device, determine which one offers the service it needs, connect to it, and get a reading “Push” model. In healthcare devices it’s easier to use a push model… that is, a device will notify the smartphone that a reading is ready and send the reading. This in contrast to early versions where the smartphone had to poll the device Standards. The bluetooth standard covers services [1] so BLE devices from different manufacturers present their data in the same format – which is a big plus since it avoids developers having to hassle with reverse engineering data representations

This article outlines the steps I took as a newbie android BLE developer to get a basic Android app talk to a couple of BLE devices.

First, download the extremely handy “BLE Scanner” from BluePixel here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.macdom.ble.blescanner&hl=en

This app helps save a lot of time by displaying which services and characteristics are present on a device. Connect to your BLE device and snoop around which services are being offered. See if you can read any values

Second, read the fantastic article by Marcelle Gibble on toastdroid regarding android BLE here:

http://toastdroid.com/2014/09/22/android-bluetooth-low-energy-tutorial/



I had to pay special attention to the “Configure Descriptor for Notify” and “Receive Notifications” sections…

Understand the basic android code on how to connect and read information from a BLE device in “Android Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Example” by Mohit Gupt here:

http://www.truiton.com/2015/04/android-bluetooth-low-energy-ble-example/

Using the last link above to provide me with a skeleton app, I then set about modifying the code to: Receive notifications as described by the toastdroid article, i.e. by configuring the descriptor for notify and overriding the “onCharacteristicChanged” [2] method



The full code can be found here [3]:

Figuring out which service to subscribe to takes some fiddling around with the Android Studio debugger, by setting a breakpoint on line 267 above and inspecting the “services” object

In line 294 in the code above we read the float value with an offset of “1”, since this is a temperature record as described in [4], we see the first byte is reserved for flags, and the actual temperature reading starts at the second byte.

The resulting app automatically detects which device is sending data to it, and displays the information read on screen:

References

[1] Bluetooth developer portal, https://developer.bluetooth.org/gatt/services/Pages/ServicesHome.aspx

[2] Android Developers, https://developer.android.com/reference/android/bluetooth/BluetoothGattCallback.html#onCharacteristicChanged

[3] BLE demo app gist, https://gist.github.com/dvas0004/e78cd9f73a331d856bec

[4] Bluetooth Temperature Measurement, https://developer.bluetooth.org/gatt/characteristics/Pages/CharacteristicViewer.aspx?u=org.bluetooth.characteristic.temperature_measurement.xml