Ensuring Safety On The Road For School Going Children
A vital part of providing quality education to children is ensuring their safety while traveling between school and home. We developed a low cost, effective smart school bus system utilizing various homemade as well as off the shelf components. This paper discusses the hardware-based smart school bus system for monitoring and ensuring the safety of school going children onboard a school bus.
Being a small country with the 8th largest population in the world [1] and having insufficient road structures have caused traffic conditions in Bangladesh to deteriorate over the years, especially in the metropolitan cities of the country. According to a World Bank report, within the last ten years, the average speed of vehicles on the roads of Dhaka, the capital city of the country, has plummetted from 21 kilometers per hour (kmph) to a staggering 7 kmph. During rush hours, situations become abysmal near school areas as each student prefer to travel using their family car for the lack of a reliable public transport system. According to the same report, it is assumed that by 2035, the average traffic speed in Dhaka might drop down to 4 kmph, which is below the average human walking speed [2]. Incorporated with a few other factors, this ever-declining average traffic speed and frequent road congestions have been posing an adverse effect on the overall driving behavior of people [15]. When these data are combined with the fact that Dhaka is the most densely populated city in the world, with almost 45,000 people living in per square kilometers of the city [14], it’s no wonder that the roads of the city are not safe for school going children because of fatal road accidents [13]. Hence, we focused on developing a smart school bus system which will provide a low cost but effective hardware-based solution of the problem of monitoring safety status of the school going children onboard school vehicles in Dhaka as well as in other major cities with similar traffic conditions.
As the topic of providing road safety to school going children while onboard school vehicle is of paramount importance, a considerable number of different approaches have been taken to address this issue by various researchers. Tanaka and Naito [3] implemented a system for cooperative location tracking of buses with smartphones, wireless LAN, and Bluetooth Low Energy devices. On Road Vehicle Breakdown Assistance (ORVBA) system However, their system had bandwidth as well as security limitations. Rengaraj and Bijlani [4] described an alternative system using RFID technology for ensuring the security of school children while driving to and from school. Shaaban et al [10] implemented a smart school bus tracking system using passive RFID technology as opposed to active RFID based school transport security system implemented by Al-Lawai et al [9]. While Dhivya and Kathiravan [5] implemented a hybrid security & vigilance system for vehicles, Bojan, Kumar, and Bojan [6] took an IoT (Internet of Things) based approach for an intelligent transport system. Both Al-Ismaili, Al-mahruqi, and Vrindavanam [7] & Shah and Singh [8] utilized RFID and GSM technology to implement safety and tracking systems for school buses. However, in addition to sending the vehicle location data to the parents via SMS as done in [7], [8] also implemented an early accident warning system utilizing buzzers and ultrasonic sensors to alert the driver of the bus. Similarly, Khan and Mishra [11] took a GPS-GSM based approach for developing a tracking system
We tested our system against seating arrangements for three students on three different seats. Whenever a student sat on the seat, the pressure pad device could successfully detect the change in pressure and sent the appropriate signal. On the real-time seating data display sub-module, an occupied seat was shown as marked in red color. The CPDSM could successfully send this data to the remote server utilizing the cellular data network available on the CDRM device. We also tested the functionality and effectiveness of our homemade pressure pad device against objects with different mass to figure out the lowest weight limit for activating the pressure pad device.
The system proposed here by us can serve in ensuring and monitoring the state of safety of school going children while traveling between school and home on a school bus which will help in providing quality educations to the school going children in a safer manner. Code Shoppy As this system can inform parents about the safety status of their children inside the school bus in real-time, it possesses the capability of swaying the opinion of the parents in favor of introducing a centralized smart school bus system in Dhaka city as well as in other places with similar traffic and safety issues. This might, in turn, play a pivotal role in reducing traffic congestions near school areas and in other critical road-junctions during rush hours, thus improving the overall traffic conditions of a city.
