A Novel Wireless Sensor Network Architecture for Crowd Disaster Mitigation

Disasters aroused due to dynamic movement of large, uncontrollable crowds are ever increasing. The inherent real-time dynamics of crowd need to be tightly monitored and alerted to avoid such disasters. Most of the existing crowd monitoring systems is difficult to deploy, maintain, and dependent on single component failure. This research work proposes novel network architecture based on the key technologies of wireless sensor network and mobile computing for the effective prediction of causes of crowd disaster particularly stampedes in the crowd and thereby alerting the crowd controlling station to take appropriate actions in time. In the current implemented version of the proposed architecture, the smart phones act as wireless sensor nodes to estimate the probability of occurrence of stampede using data fusion and analysis of embedded sensors such as tri-axial accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS, light sensors etc. The implementation of the proposed architecture in smart phones provides light weight, easy to deploy, context aware wireless services for effective crowd disaster mitigation.