Smart Urban Monitoring System

Project Title

Smart Urban Monitoring System

Project Area of Specialization Internet of ThingsProject Summary

With the rapid increase in the trend of industrialization and urbanization in cities, environmental pollution is increasing exponentially, resulting in adverse effects on health. Pakistan is a developing country and these trends are a major issue to be addressed. The levels of air and noise pollution are increased to the point that Hypertension, sleeplessness, anxiety and lung diseases can be commonly observed among people. At some time of the year, the AQI reaches beyond the hazardous level and people require health masks to step outdoor. To be able to address the issue, it is necessary to recognize the trend of these abnormalities in different areas of a city to take steps to control it. This device would help in monitoring the levels of different levels of pollution, which is the first step of problem solving.

In the past five decades that urbanization is going at a rapid rate and a lot of urban problems are also emerging. To overcome these modern-day problems, we need effective and efficient solution, IoT based urban monitoring systems are playing their vital role in this regard. 1.135 trillion dollars, that’s how much developing Smart Cities projects will cost worldwide in 2019. In 2014 the figure was only 411 billion dollars, that’s how fast these projects are developing. And for this we need scalable systems to manage and monitor data which will be backbone for Smart Cities. Right now, there’s no versatile and complete Smart City solution available commercially.

Evaluating, monitoring and informing about urban environmental quality has become a main issue, particularly important when considered as a decision-making tool that contributes to more habitable and sustainable cities.

Pakistan has similar issues as faced by the developed world. In Pakistan also urbanization took place at a rapid rate and we face urban management problems. In order to overcome these issues, we need to develop some smart urban monitoring system that is scalable and address the issues faced at urban level. There are issues like excessive noise pollution, air pollution, rain management, safe city projects these can be handled using smart urban monitoring system and can be integrated with other modules like UV index measurements through light sensors etc.

Project Objectives

Our main objective would be to create a low cost IoT based solution that can sense various parameters and then transmit that data over the cloud, and data processing could take place and different directories could be generated using that data.Community driven data collection is one of the major advantages of this device.

Our main deliverables in order to address the above mentioned problems would be a comprehensive IoT based solution that basically monitors four parameters right now that includes Temp and humidity measurement, noise pollution measurement, UV intensity measurement and live stream through a camera. All this data coming from different sensors would be then transmitted over the cloud and using this data, we could generate different alarming situations that could help in better urban development.

For example, using the noise pollution data, health advisories could be generated that could be beneficial for the people. Similarly, in order to reduce that noise pollution we can provide advisory to the government to take action in controlling the noise pollution. Likewise, the data coming from temperature and humidity sensors and UV sensors would help us in generating real time health advisories for people. Camera live stream could help us in taking security actions. And in future, using this data one can apply machine learning algorithms to detect unknown and suspicious events occurring on the road sides.

Project Implementation Method

Our offered solution provides a generic device that is compatible with several sensors’ modules used for monitoring of certain parameters such as Noise levels, Video feed for security and monitoring, UV radiation levels, Light intensity levels. The raw data from the sensors will be captured by the microcontroller and processed into values for statistical and graphical analysis. The data will be sent over the internet via the Wi-Fi module onto the AWS platform. The information on the factors being monitored will be displayed using statistics and graphs on a website that will be hosted using EC2 service provided by AWS. AWS provides its own DNS protocol using Route53 so a server will be set up for anyone to connect to and gain access to the information using a website link that connects to our website’s IP address.

Hardware Components	Software Components
Microcontroller	Application for the respective Microcontroller
Noise Sensor	Libraries for sensors
UV and Light sensor	Cloud Storage (e.g., AWS S3)
Temperature and Humidity	Cloud Computing (e.g., AWS EC2)
Camera	DNS Protocol (e.g., AWS Route53)

Hardware Components

Microcontroller

Noise Sensor

UV and Light sensor

Temperature and Humidity

Camera

Benefits of the Project

According to the study only noise pollution causes a huge economic loss to EU. The cost of damage caused by the noise generated by road and rail traffic was recently estimated at $44.28B in EU. This estimate to almost 18B$ loss to Pakistan annually. There are no monitoring systems to identify the problem to be able to resolve them.

Similar droughts are faced by Pakistan in Economy, Health and Infrastructure due to exponentially increasing pollution with the rapid trends of Urbanization. 

To act against pollution by extabilishing necessary measures, the first requirement is to identify the problem. This project will help monitoring this pollution all over the country to identify a trend and use necessary means and actions to minimize it. Noise pollution has a drastic effect on human health, not only ears, but issues like hypertension, insomia, agression etc and other mental issues arise from it. Temperature and Humidity can cause shortness of breath and exhaustion, resulting in decresed efficiency. Higher UV intensity rays can cause Melanoma and other Skin cancer and diseases. Camera adds a security feature to the device, with live feed over the streets and in a certain area. 

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

The Final deliverable would consist of a main device, one android application and a cloud dashboard for monitoring data. The main device would consist of:

1 main micro controller and 1 Backup Micro controller (Raspberry Pi)

A pair of Noise sensors connected Pi, called a noise sensing Module.

A pair of temperature sensors connected to another esp 32, a module for humidity and temperature sensing.

UV light and Intensity sensors module consisting of a pair of UV sensors  connected to esp 32, which is connected to Pi. 

A sony ArduCAM directly connected with Pi for Live video. 

The modular structure would make the device more robust. All the data will be sent to the cloud Using Pi, cloud will act as an MQTT broker between Raspberry Pi (Publisher) and Android App (Subscriber). 

All these would be hooked to a battery powered circuit which would be connected to a source, making it optimized for conditions like load shedding.

Final Deliverable of the Project HW/SW integrated systemCore Industry HealthOther Industries Others Core Technology Internet of Things (IoT)Other Technologies Cloud InfrastructureSustainable Development Goals Good Health and Well-Being for People, Life on LandRequired Resources

Elapsed time in (days or weeks or month or quarter) since start of the project	Milestone	Deliverable
Month 1	Reasearch Literature review + case studies	Research report
Month 2	Project Proposal defense	Report + presentation
Month 3	Additional Research	Research report + Articles
Month 4	Research about components Simulation and testing	Simulation
Month 5	Initital testing of sensors	Sensor results
Month 6	Using filter techniques and regression to calibrate	Calibrated results
Month 7	Proceed to rest of the sensors and apply same techniques	Calibrated results
Month 8	Interfacing Raspberry Pi with Amazon web services	Progress report
Month 9	Interfacing Pi with other micro controllers	Progress report
Month 10	Android Application for receiving data	Android app + Progress report
Month 11	Back end processing for sensor calibration on cloud	Progress report
Month 12	Final device with Report and final presentation	Complete device