MeshSOS: An IoT Based Emergency Response System

Abstract

Due to the limited mobility and technical knowledge, senior and disabled citizens of the society face difficulties during emergencies. Most hardware/software emergency assistance/response systems available in the market have a complex user interface even for the general public. Requesting help using these systems requires sharing information such as type and location of the event, which wastes precious time to respond to the event. Often, citizens end up handling the event themselves instead of waiting for someone to arrive at the event location. Hence, it is necessary to design a simple but incredibly robust system which bypasses the challenges of traditional emergency response systems. In this paper, we propose an Internet of Things (IoT) based mesh-enabled emergency response system called MeshSOS, which enables senior and disabled citizens to get assistance by simply pressing a button. Use of mesh networking along with WiFi made our system robust to network failures. We have also developed a central monitoring application for healthcare and security agencies to handle emergency events proactively. Initial field experiments and simulations show that our system has the potential to improve the robustness and response time in an energy and cost-efficient manner.