LoRa-Based Wireless Emergency Alert and Response System for Tribal and Rural Areas

Abstract: Cellular coverage for wide areas within India’s hilly and tribal interiors is sparse or non-existent, and even if there is a limited cellular network coverage, this too is the first thing to be affected by any natural calamity like flood, landslide, etc. Thus, the people living in such areas have no way of contacting their medical and police services during any emergency situation. This paper describes an economical and low power emergency alerting system based on LoRa (Long Range) Radio Communication which works completely independent of cellular network and Internet. In each village, the node consists of a microcontroller board (Arduino Uno) interfaced to Semtech SX1278 (Ra-02) LoRa module working at 433MHz frequency. There are dedicated push buttons available in each node through which any person can trigger medical or police emergency. Accordingly the node will send a small identifying packet containing the village ID and kind of assistance required. The Hospital and Police Station Nodes are in constant receiving mode and keep showing alerts on 16×2 LCD display while sounding a buzzer and activating LEDs. As soon as an alert gets acknowledged, a confirmatory packet will be sent back to originating village through a status LED. Moreover, each node also features a light circuit for a street light controlled by LDR, which works independent of the alerting system, thereby demonstrating another example of how the same powersaving platform could be used. A prototype, consisting of two village nodes, a hospital node, and a police station node, has been developed and tested in real-world conditions; reliable communication was achieved up to 1 km distance in the open field, with each node consuming around 0.6 W of energy.

Keywords: LoRa, SX1278, Arduino Uno, Emergency Communication, Rural Connectivity, Tribal Areas, Wireless Sensor Network, Disaster Management, LDR Sensor, Internet of Things.