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Background
Child safety is one of main priorities in parenting. most parents are used to believe school transportation services as a safer mode of transportation. But increased prevalence of road traffic accidents, social violence and child abuse nowadays always create an uncertainty in parents’ mind whether the child has reached the school and returned home safe and on time. Being a parent that uncertainity is an added stress despite their busy daily routines. Parents tend to make calls to the school van driver adding an unintentional threat upon their child's safety. On the other hand, once both parents are employed, they lack time and access to refer the status of child’s school travel.
Limitations in existing solutions.
GPS tracker device - Conventional location tracking systems are having GPS module coupled with GSM modem for real time location tracking. Main limitation here is there is no way of getting children’s presences in the school van. Another limitation is if GPS device is faulty then a technical person must physically visit the school van and repair or replace it. If a company is offering island wide service then it need to have sufficient staff to attend to device related issues which results in high operational cost.
Mobile phone based tracking services – Mobile phone will be providing to the child which is having restricted basic functions such as calling, messaging and internet browsing. Main advantage here is child exact location can be tracked. But limitations are child’s phone must be charged daily due to high power consumption of GPS module, high possibility of damaging or misplacing the phone when it handles by children.
Hybrid school children tracking solution based on BLE and GPS
The tracking solution consists with three modules. Beacons, Android application for school vans and mobile app for parents.
Beacons
Beacons are provided to children which can be used as a key tag or place inside school bag. There are several beacon protocols are available such as iBeacon from Apple, Eddystone from Google and AtlBeacon from Radius Networks. For the solution AtlBeacon protocol has been used since it is open source and interoperability with mobile operating systems. These beacons use BLE to communicate with each other and operates in 2.4 GHz licensed frequency. Therefore, no interruptions to the communication from other devices. Beacon transmit an advertisement message that is encapsulated in BLE advertising PDU at a configured frequency as depicted in below figure.
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| Source: https://github.com/AltBeacon/spec/blob/master/altbeacon-spec-exploded-view.png |
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Why Beacons?
Durability and long battery life. Battery life is depending on advertisement message frequency and transmit power.
School van Android application
The application uses Beacon ID to uniquely identify a child and Ref RSSI field is used to measure the distance to beacon (i.e. Child).
Main functionalities of school van Android application
- Frequently report GPS readings to backend server.
- Report beacon ID discovery event (i.e. child get into van) and exit event (i.e. child drop) to backend server.
- Provide interface to the school van driver to send emergency messages to parents.
Parent mobile application
Parents’ engagement with the solution is based via the parent mobile application.
Main functions of parent mobile application
- Search school vans based on route.
- Self-registration
- Child profile management.
- Package managements and payments.
- Real time location tracking and view history events
- Receive messages on child entry, exit and emergency messages from school van.
References:
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