IIT Kharagpur Developed a Radio Frequency Tracking System for School Children's Safety


BENGALURU: A team of IIT Kharagpur designed an electronic tracking system by using the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. It will ensure the safety of kids by keeping track while they are traveling to and from the school. A school is ready to implement this system into its infrastructure.  As reported by the Tech 2 website, this low-cost technology will help in addressing the parents’ concerns about their children’s safety and will decrease their dependency on private vehicles as a transportation option.

RFID is the technology that uses radio waves to read information from a tag attached to any object. The object consists of a reader and a tag or label. As told by Bhargab Maitra, a professor of civil engineering department at IIT-Kgp, the student ID cards will be tagged with RFID and its reader will be inbuilt in school transport buses. As the children boarded the bus, that RFID reader will ‘read’ the tag from ID card and the student name will be mentioned in the database.

All of the buses will be GPS enabled and as the child board the bus, the system will check that child information in their database. After getting confirmation from the database, a text message will be sent to the parent’s registered mobile number about boarding status of the child. Parents will receive a similar kind of message when the child deboards the bus as deboarding place and time will also be mentioned in that message. If there will be any unnecessary halt, that is not according to bus schedule or in case of any other irregularity, an immediate alert will be sent to the nearby police station to take prompt action.

Kgp team designed a mobile application linked to the tracker by which parents can track the movements of their children on a real-time basis. The system will be implemented for the first time in South Point School on the trial basis for a couple of weeks. The development team did a survey to understand the prime concerns of parents regarding their school going kids. The Kolkata Traffic Police also collaborated with Kgp’s professors and students team in organizing the survey under the “Improvement of School Safety” project that is a part of “Future of Cities” initiative run by central government.

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