Every day millions of children need to travel from home to school and vice versa. For parents to obtain safer transport for their children is sometimes a critical issue. Crime against children is increasing every day, especially in developed countries [1]. Children in the world employ an excessive time travelling to and from school.
In the United States of America, more than 25 school bus tracking apps are in place in 2019 [2], to help concerned parents about their children to know where their children are located. Those platforms provide school bus information of their children to parents: a bus is running late, to get an estimated time of its arrival, bus map location, notification if it is behind the schedule, and alert in case of emergency [3].
With specialised trackers, all children transport stakeholders could continuously see where their children are non-violent, and so on. As an alternative to providing the information just to parents, these apps offer services to school administration of keeping track of their students, and bus companies use them to expand their safety and to provide better service.
In South Africa, vehicle tracking services represent a multimillion-rand industry including solutions for tracking children to school [4]. “TrackSchoolBus” is one of them and is currently used. The platform has a parent app with the following key features: School bus attendance to view complete and precise school bus attendance of the children anytime from anywhere without contacting authorities. Real-time location and notifications help you to pick the children from their respective bus stops at right time and generates complete details of the school bus journey of the children. Leave management to apply leave for the children if needed without contacting school management. View schedule route to visualize the detailed view of the scheduled route of the school bus trip and receive a notification of any changes or updates in the scheduled route. Bus stops re-assignment to change the pickup/drop-down point of the children via an app without much hassle if any relocation is needed. Lastly provides communication with school management and drivers via an app [5].
In East African region, specifically in Tanzania solution like School bus tracker is in place [6]. Children's whereabouts at your fingertips provide child safety as a top priority to any concerned parent. Parents need to know their children are safe while in transit to and from their respective schools. It makes sense to have a GPS vehicle tracking system installed in school buses to ensure the safety of children to add value to education services [6].
In Rwanda, during school time every day children risk many challenges like extended travel times, overloaded buses, long bus stop waiting times, late arrival and departure, taking the wrong bus, get out to the wrong bus stop, etc. These challenges faced by children during their trip to and from school result in a problem for many parents due to the lack of enough information on their school bus system. The only solution parents have for those challenges is to make calls to different individuals like a bus driver, teacher, school administration, other parents, neighbours, or doing nothing and wait until the children returned home safely in the evening. In some cases, this can result in blaming children when they are late yet it is not their fault, while in some cases they have waked up early. Such a situation is one of the factors that can affect the performance of students and leads to the poor quality of education in general.
Some parents prefer to use their cars to take their children to/from school but this also is a delinquent to them as they are mostly late to their office or to take their children from school [7].
Some private companies or individuals and/or schools tried to respond to children’s transport problem within Kigali by providing coloured yellow school buses to indicate that they are dedicated to school transport only, however, issues persisted as no system provides information in real-time to allow parents to track where their children are located during the school time.
Another challenge of children transport within Kigali city is its topology that affects at large the way of going and coming of children to and from school definitely, as it is difficult to track school bus due to traffic jam caused by limited and small roads. According to Smart City Rwanda Master Plan [8], an integrated transport app will help to enhance the reliability of public transport including children transport's while also acting as a strategic tool for designing routes and intervals to assist in children's safety.
The Internet of things (IoT) as a paradigm promises to make things including consumer electronic devices or home appliances such as medical devices, fridges, cameras, and sensors part of the internet environment. This paradigm opens doors to innovations that will build a novel type of interactions among things and humans and enables the realisation of smart cities, infrastructures, and services for enhancing the quality of life and utilisation of resources [9]. IoT can be used in many applications, but in this research, the focus is on monitoring children’s location during their trips to and from school.
This paper aims to design and develop a prototype for an IoT-based monitoring system to enable all concerned bodies to have a reliable and secure school transport service to guarantee the security of the children. The system tracks children’s locations among the following locations: home, bus stop, inside the bus, and school. It combines RFID and GPS technologies and connects them to a remote server using a GSM/GPRS module and their technologies and provides real-time notification.
Different reports showing attendance, incident, pickup time and location, etc. may be generated by the system from the real-time data and make them available through a system to schools, parents, and other stakeholders who are concerned for bus comfort, safety, and attendance, toward providing complete visibility into conditions from home, inside school bus up to school and the way back to school. The system intends to monitor the children's location and provide related information by sending notifications through emails and/or SMSs to different bodies per demand by default and automated notifications as optional.
The scope of the work is to design a hybrid IoT multimodal and simulate or develop its prototype system that can track the movements of a child and keep monitoring his or her location to respond to the parents’ concerns after sending their children to school. The system should be able to send a notification to parents and school administration per demand via an SMS with the option of automated notification.
It has been shown by Raja et al. [1] that the use of the applicability of RFID technology for tracking and monitoring children during their trip to and from school in school buses, considering its advantage of efficient tracking capabilities, low cost, and easy maintenance can contribute in identifying the presence of children at school. Then that information could be communicated to the parent and school via the GSM module. The system does not cover the distance from home to a bus stop.
Children tracking systems are currently adopted in different places worldwide. A system that allows the parents to be notified when their ward alights or boards the bus is developed by Raj and Sankar [10]. The developers made use of RFID and GPS technologies to identify each student and locate a vehicle respectively and connect them to a remote server over Wi-Fi using an ESP8266 microcontroller. The information can be accessed by the parents through a mobile application and this helps parents track their wards effectively. The school administration can also access the application to ensure student safety and contact a driver or a parent. However, the system does not consider child safety between home and bus stops.
The big challenge for parents and different stakeholders concerning children's safety while to and from school is tracing where they are whenever they are not with them. Therefore, considering the local context specifically in the urban area of the City of Kigali, the standalone solution to the above problem is calling individuals or moving to school to inquire about their children’s conditions. This is not a viable solution with the current advanced technology as instead, it is time and money-consuming. But so far, there is no other solution. To solve this problem, it needs to provide an adequate real-time platform in Kigali City that can generate information for all those concerned about children's safety while commuting to/from school.
It is in this line, to address the above issue, a solution should be designed as an IoT based smart school bus monitoring and notification system that tracks children from their home to school and the way back and be able to send information about the location of children to all concerned bodies given local context. The system should be able to communicate in real-time via SMS in both directions between the system and parents or school administration or bus driver or any other entity concerned. This interaction can be considered as the advantage of the proposed system.