IoT Early Warning System Helps Save People From Mudslides in El Salvador

by Deepak Puri,  Network World

Floods and mudslides regularly devastate El Salvador. Villagers can identify impending floods and mudslides, but they are unable to warn others in time. Rugged terrain, lack of power and cellular networks present a formidable communication challenge. Reacción, a team of El Salvadorian experts in electronics, community development and disaster relief, decided to do something about it. Working with local villagers and global experts, they developed an IoT-based early warning system for disasters that’s now shared globally.

The Reaccion group determined the system needed to include input from village elders with experience in spotting signs of imminent catastrophe. It also had to be battery-powered, rugged, affordable, and easy to use for people lacking formal education. The team developed a prototype with the local FabLab, a design-thinking lab conceived by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Neil Gershenfeld to “solve local problems with local actors through technological innovation and the use of digital manufacturing tools.”

Villagers can alert each other with the IoT system even in the absence of power and telephone communications, using a battery-operated device with color-coded buttons to signal both an impending disaster and its severity. The device uses IoT weather sensors and accelerometers to read tremors. Reaccion links villages across mountainous terrain with an Early Warning System via a mesh network where each village has its own alerting device, which serves as a node. The devices store and update data information across the network in a peer-to-peer manner.  Read the article.

DCL: This is a pretty simple distributed real-time event processing system containing just a little CEP. Similar kinds of systems, say for detection of emerging disease epidemics in remote parts of the world, need to use a lot more CEP because event aggregation and abstraction are essential to deterimine when rumors add up to a gathering medical catastrophe.