On-Air Q&A Physical Proximity System

Live Q&A and polling systems, also known as Classroom Response Systems (CRS), have become essential tools for enhancing audience engagement, interactivity, and learning effectiveness across various interactive settings. Recent research consistently highlights that CRS significantly increase audience participation and attention, largely due to the benefits of anonymity and instant feedback, encouraging contributions from those who might otherwise hesitate to participate. By making the technology virtually invisible, eliminating cumbersome hardware and complex logins, CRS further reduce barriers to audience engagement. However, existing CRS solutions encounter significant limitations, including reliance on external network infrastructure, poor scalability, energy inefficiency, and complexities related to device pairing and connectivity. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel On-Air Q&A system architecture utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.4’s Periodic Advertising with Responses (PAwR). The proposed system provides scalable, energy-efficient, and infrastructure-independent bidirectional communication, enabling seamless, anonymous, and highly interactive real-time audience-speaker interactions in proximity-based environments. A prototype implementation of the presented approach has been developed using nRF development kits.