IoT based flood and landslide disasters monitoring and SMS alert system in Northern Province Rwanda

Abstract

Floods and Landslides are amongst the major disasters in Rwanda and have had a great impact on human lives, human development, properties, infrastructures as well as environment due to geographical aspect, heavy rain and mining activities. The design and implementation of IoT based floods and landslide disaster monitoring and SMS alert system detect and monitor parameters of flood and landslide disasters at specific high-risk zone of Norther province in Rwanda by using wireless sensor network such as flow sensor, water level sensor, soil moisture sensor, accelerometer sensor and ultrasonic sensor deployed at those specific areas for collecting parameters of flooding and landslide. All sensor nodes are connected to microcontroller board which aggregate sensed data and process, analyses them then send parameters to the cloud platform for being analyzed and monitored on time. The system automatically compares the measured parameters with the threshold value that are settled for the probability of flood and landslide disaster. If the measured values exceed the threshold values that are settled, an alert message generate and data sent to the ThingSpeak cloud platform and through the use of a Global System for Mobile (GSM) as warning notification to the affected citizens for those do not subscribe mobile data or do not have any internet connection then to nearest relevant authorities to take action accordingly and provide a required support to the vulnerable people and properties before predicted time for saving live and environment. The system also calculates and provide the time it would take for flood or landslide to reach them so that they can evacuate accordingly. To implement this solutions researcher, use a recursive algorithm developed using Arduino C programming language which is understood by microcontroller Arduino broad and written in Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) editor.