hackproject.org — Impact with IoT — {August, 2016}

For a country like Nepal, on one side is the challenge of geography and weather and on the other is the growing human animal conflict. In both crops, fields, houses and lives are getting destroyed.

During the recent monsoon, floods and landslides left major parts of Pyuthan communication less and more than 100 people lost their lives. Many of the people could only be contacted 8 days after after the first floods.

Elephants and other animals including deers and rhinos cause havoc to crop fields and houses on the border of the Bardiya National Park every year.

Core missing components in both are early warning and communication systems at the ground level. Also missing are systems for tracking animal movements and warding off animals.

Half way around the world in El Salvador engineers, community development and disaster relief experts created Reacción, an IoT-based early warning system for disasters. Reacción works even when power and phone communication is down using simple battery powered devices that use color-coded buttons to transmit information that even villagers without formal education can use.

In Southern Guyana, the Wapichan community built a drone, based on videos that they saw on youtube, to track and ward off illegal loggers from forests around them. This drone allows them to now go into very inaccessible areas before to track people movement and logging activities.

Reacción allows for early warning and communications while the drone allows for tracking. Both are built at local levels to solve local level problems. Both are or expected to be simple, reliable and cost effective. As they address problems at the local level there is an ownership from the community to make them work.

Thinking back to the problems in Nepal, can these or similar ideas to these be used in the local context here for probably the same kinds of tasks that these systems have been successfully deployed elsewhere. What modifications might be required to meet the demands of a different location like Nepal where within 300 kilometers one goes from the scorching heats of the Terai to the highest of peaks of the Himalayas?

Social impact is enhanced by transfer of knowledge and impact itself. Can IoT be the media for cheap, yet reliable revolution in impact?

IoT early warning system El Salvador — http://www.networkworld.com/article/3110545/internet-of-things/iot-early-warning-system-helps-save-people-from-mudslides.html?utm_content=buffer3abac&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Forest Tribe build a drone — qz.com/662530/a-tiny-forest-tribe-built-a-diy-drone-from-youtube-to-fight-off-illegal-loggers/

Bardiya Animal warning problem — https://medium.com/@pravenj/hackproject-org-animal-warning-system-august-2016-ed311582d39c

Warning system problem — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnusRdPuD2o

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