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WeDoCare: A humanitarian people-centric cyber-physical system for the benefit of refugees

Abstract:

Day-to-day gadgets, like smartphones, are becoming increasingly more intelligent and interconnected. In fact, the 'Internet of Things' is being used to support many new types of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). These interconnected and intelligent devices use various sensors which can be used to monitor and evaluate human parameters, and improving the humans' life quality. In this work we present WeDoCare, an implementation of a Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical System (HiTLCPS) that attempts to help solve issues in real-world scenarios. Having in mind the refugee crisis in Europe, WeDoCare aims to detect, in an automated way and in real-time, violent attacks against users through a scream detector, using the mobile phones sensors, in particular the microphone. This data is processed through a signal processing algorithm to infer emergency situations. When an emergency is detected, it warns nearby citizens that someone is in danger, allowing for crowd collaboration and altruism. The application also contains an innovative beacon system so that communication with nearby or surrounding people isn't limited by an Internet connection. Since it is necessary that our implementation lasts as much as possible, we performed some battery-level tests, to realize the involvement of some application parameters with the battery drainage. We also evaluated the range of the beacon system.