Analysis of pedestrian behaviors through non-invasive Bluetooth monitoring

•Noninvasive Bluetooth monitoring is employed to collect a large-scale dataset of human mobility.•Explore how factors of the shopping environment can impact a pedestrian's underlying mobility.•Compares and evaluates pedestrians' spatiotemporal dynamics before, during and after the discount sales.•Findings enable a more flexible and efficient approach to urban planning and management.

This paper presents a novel framework to analyze pedestrians' behavioral patterns throughout shopping environments in the historical center of Barcelona, Spain. We employ a Bluetooth detection technique to capture a large-scale dataset of pedestrians' behavior over a one-month period, including during a key sales period. We focused on comparing particular behaviors before, during, and after the discount sales by analyzing this large-scale dataset, which is different but complementary to the conventionally used small-scale samples. Our results uncover pedestrians actively exploring a wider area of the district during a discount period compared to weekdays, giving rise to strong underlying mobility patterns.