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Blindness is a natural curse but it does not mean blind people are not able to experience the world that a normal person does. Around 2 million people are visually challenged in Pakistan. They have to tackle daily routine tasks with such a precision including walking which poses a number of different obstacles hindering their passage. Generally, a blind person takes a white-cane as a supporting tool,...
The great strength of satellite communications for humanitarian applications is independence of terrestrial infrastructure. However, satellite telecommunications systems typically suffer high recurrent costs, for example, monthly service charges, which are levied on each terminal device. This makes the pre-provision of satellite communications in disaster-prone regions very expensive. This is especially...
This paper describes the humanitarian effort to help bring clean water and solar power to people in need along the Amazon River in Nauta, Peru. George Fox University partnered with JungleMaster Ministries to create a long-term development plan, beginning with a full prototype of the system at the NGO's house in Nauta. The engineering design, installation, and test of the system are discussed in detail,...
Improving in the quality of life by expanding functionality and durability while continually reducing the fabrication costs and maintaining the possibility of local fabrication, these are the four key design requirements for lower-limb prosthetics with humanitarian applications. Currently, however, there are few foot prostheses that meet these requirements. The solutions available world-wide include...
This paper discusses how to achieve high PV penetrations for a hybrid diesel-PV micro-grid via the means of a cloud forecasting system. The micro-grid control system utilizes cloud forecasts to forecast PV transients and manage online diesel generation. Simulation results for the test micro-grid showed that an array size of 2 MW achieved an energy penetration of 30.8% with «11.5 annual faults. Additionally,...
In this paper, we report on a proof-of-concept wearable prototype, called iSeiz, that can detect specific seizure activity, namely generalized tonic-clonic, in epilepsy patients. We first describe the high-level architecture of iSeiz, and then elaborate on its hardware and software features, including its robust and low-computational intensive real-time seizure detection algorithm (SDA), as well as...
The main message of international disaster frameworks as well as the political agenda is clear: Every player in the humanitarian domain should aim for a paradigm shift from managing disasters to pro-active disaster risk management. In practice, however, this process can be very complex: Tailored technological solutions require collaborative developments and related organizational adaptions. Early...
Development, adoption and use of humanitarian technologies are influenced by a country's innovation ecosystem. In the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) domain, tech or innovation hubs are critical to promoting entrepreneurship and fostering startups. In analyses of these hubs, success is often measured by the number of high growth startups created. However, while useful in the context...
Poor water quality in Pettipalam Colony in Thalassery, Kannur District, Kerala is the source of many health issues among the colony residents. Soil and water contamination due to the accumulation of waste is another serious issue that adversely affects the health of the inhabitants in the area. There is a compelling need for the village inhabitants to appropriately monitor the water bodies and take...
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, also known as SIDS, is the leading cause of mortality in infants from one month to one year of age. We propose a video-based baby monitoring system with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities to help shorten the response time of SIDS cases. Using a video amplification technique developed at MIT dubbed “Eulerian Magnification” to amplify subtle movements, we can compare...
Telemedicine systems are becoming prevalent in today's healthcare scenarios, especially in India where a large portion of the population resides in remote and rural regions where availability of specialty healthcare is scant. Many such telemedicine system implementations can be found in the existing literature. Since critical data are being transmitted over these networks, the reliability of these...
We report on UAV(unmanned aerial vehicle)-based imaging missions over rice and corn fields in Isabela province in the Philippines. Spectral reflectance sensors were deployed for ground truthing, while aerial imagery were produced from RGB and NIR-retrofitted cameras. The ground truth sensors function as calibration points for extending the measurements over the whole imaged field. UAV-based missions...
Over one billion people around the world lack access to grid electricity. Over the last few years, solar panel prices have dropped dramatically leading to more affordable solar electric systems. A typical solar home system comprises one or more solar panels, a charge controller, inverter and a bank of lead acid batteries. However, the weak point in these systems is the battery bank which requires...
This paper presents a study of mobile device literacy in Senegal within the context of the AppliCafé project. Research in this area has been mostly conducted in Anglophone countries. We designed a kiosk structure that we call AppliCafé (derived from the term cyber café) that can move between locations and is equipped with mobile technology, including training videos and a mobile application. This...
Ad-hoc Wi-Fi is well known in disaster communications systems, because of its ability to form infrastructure-free peer-to-peer networks. However, ad-hoc Wi-Fi has a major disadvantage due to the lack of coordinating infrastructure: Its energy consumption is very high, reducing battery life to as little as 1.5 hours. Thus, while it would be highly desirable for mobile phones to use ad-hoc Wi-Fi communications...
The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) of Government of India has so far seen only mixed results with nearly one fourth of the children under the age of 6 years are still undernourished. The budgetary allocation has been increasing over the years to strengthen and close gaps in the program and there is increased pressure on policy makers and program implementers to show the results. We argue...
The field of wireless sensor networks is progressing at a very rapid pace with one of its major application in the area of agriculture. Several research problems have been addressed and solutions have been proposed. Most of these works are based on single crop scenario. Research done in the multiple-cropping scenario, where two or more crops are sown in a single field in the same year, are very few...
Application of crop protection materials is one of the crucial operations in agriculture to meet ever demanding food production. The drone mounted sprayer mainly consists of BLDC motors, LiPo (Lithium polymer) batteries, peticide tank, pump, and supporting frame. Six BLDC motors were mounted to hexa-copter frame to lift of 5 kg payload capacity. Two LiPo batteries of 6 cells — 8000mAh were used to...
Of late, modern lifestyle has noticeably accentuated several health hazards related to cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). A simple, cost efficient but effective way out of this threatening health issue can be the prevention of these diseases beforehand by ensuring customized routine exercise and regular health checkup. In this context, we propose Wrist-Card, a photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor based wrist...
Service-learning has been proven to be a high-impact educational pedagogy in many disciplines. It addresses human, and community needs through engaging in community activities. With professional engineering expertise, integrating engineering into service-learning not only can make particularly impactful community service, especially in developing countries where engineering expertise is not always...
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