HTA Case Studies

Project Name: Community Empowerment: Promoting Safe and Sustainable Food Production

Food security in a community exists when all people at all times have both physical and economic access to sufficient food to meet their dietary needs for productive and healthy lives. The pandemic caused by the new coronavirus COVID-19 threatened food shortages due to supply chain disruption and labour shortages. Many households are vulnerable to the impact of a severe pandemic due to the impacts on the economic and social systems.

This Humanitarian Engineering project aims to boost the local communities’ resilience of food supplies (i.e., enhance food security) through encouraging the establishment of family/kitchen gardens with the use of organic fertilizer, compost.

One of the basic steps to fertility building is using organic materials and ‘waste’ as raw materials for making quality natural fertilizer. These materials can include the plant’s remains, crop residues and livestock waste (manure and bio-slurry), and so forth, which will tactfully be incorporated to decompose and give nutrient-rich compost to be used in the family gardens.

An IEEE R10 grant of $2,000 USD facilitated the 5-weeks community technology project that reached out and motivated over 50 local community members with the capacity to build their own composter, then tried hand-on composting process at their home to make natural fertilizer.

Project Name: 3D PRINTED KIT FOR THE TECHNOLOGY DEPRIVED UNDERPRIVILEGED TO COMBAT COVID19

Food security in a community exists when all people at all times have both physical and economic access to sufficient food to meet their dietary needs for productive and healthy lives. The pandemic caused by the new coronavirus COVID-19 threatened food shortages due to supply chain disruption and labour shortages. Many households are vulnerable to the impact of a severe pandemic due to the impacts on the economic and social systems.

Project Name: TRACK & TRACE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR DEMENTIA AND INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

The purpose of this project is to design and construct a GPS tracking device that can be tracked from the internet. This project consists of four parts. The first part is a mobile device with an embedded GPS and wireless Internet connection to transmit its current location. The second part is a web server that will receive the data, parse it and store it for access over the internet. The third component is the user interface that will allow others to visually identify the current location of the device. To view its location, one could use any device that can connect to the internet such as a desktop computer, laptop, or cell phone. The data available through a browser includes a scalable map of the surrounding area, latitude, longitude, speed and altitude of the hand held device. The fourth part is the heart beat sensor which senses the heartbeat of the user.

In the proposed system, Arduino will be the microcontroller and there will be a solar panel for observing the solar energy and to store in the rechargeable battery and give supply to the whole kit. GPS is used for tracking the location of the person or to obtain the latitude and longitude of the location so that one can easily find the location. GSM is intended for sending the location to the particular person and the heartbeat sensor measures the heartbeat rate that will be displayed. Also, the project supports charging using solar cells whenever a user wants to charge the device.