Abstract--Ensuring the safety of residents and visitors is
one of the major priorities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
(KSA).We briefly
review the related literature and performed gap analysis in Section 2.Index Terms--IoT & Smart City Application, Huge Crowd
gatherings, Assistance of Pilgrims, Spatio-Temporal Modeling Smart cities employ smart technologies to deal with major
challenges by providing innovative solutions and establishing
Deanship of Scientific Research, Islamic University of Madinah, Madinah,
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
smart infrastructure.Mainly due to
their low energy consumption, reliable signal detection with
advanced BLE gateway devices, and accurate distance estima-
tion methods.In another report [2], by IoTA major cities of the world are
investing more than $ 1 billion in the year 2020 for various
initiatives including smart waste management, intelligent traf-
fic control, energy and environmental management, and smart
technologies for ensuring the safety of the residents.Public
safety is a major concern and a feature of any smart city and
there are several examples of public safety projects planned
for smart cities [3] including real-time crime reporting (Zetkey
[4]), video analytics (BriefCam [5]) for law enforcement
departments, etc.This paper aims to facilitate law enforcement
departments in the city of Madinah to effectively track and
locate missing persons from vulnerable groups in various
scenarios.BLE beacons are easily available in a wearable bracelet
that broadcast beacons and Bluetooth enabled devices, such
as, cell phones or specific BLE gateways can reliably detect
these beacons in the places even if there are no network signals
available.The main objective of this research is to facilitate the
Madinah Police and Department of lost and found in Masjid-e-
Nabavi to ensure the safety of residents and visitors in terms of
tracking and locating missing persons from vulnerable groups
using state-of-the-art IoT based system. We propose an IoT based
system with a proactive approach to help security officials in
Madinah and the Department of lost and found in Masjid e
Nabavi in two major safety issues: 1) Tracking the companion
of missing person found by a security official and 2) Tracking
the missing person using reported location via IoT based system.Other IoT sensors applications are remote
health care monitoring such as [6], [7]
However, most of them are for general residents and do not
consider the groups in the society which are prone to getting
lost during events or crowded gatherings.The proposed so-
lution integrates both apps in IoT devices to enable efficient
tracking and locating missing persons.There are some residents in Madinah who are vulnerable
or prone to getting lost in crowded areas, including children,
the elderly, and people with certain diseases and disorders.Besides, the Kingdom receives millions of visiting pilgrims in
Madinah and Makkah and thousands of them get lost every year
around Masjid-e-Nabavi and Masjid Al Haram.Madinah alongside Makkah receives millions of
visiting pilgrims for Umrah and Hajj throughout the year.Secondly,
in the case of missing pilgrims, caretakers face additional
challenges, such as, communicating (not knowing the Arabic
language) and the procedures to follow in such situations.BLE beacons providing a viable solution for IoT devices
implementation in a wide range of applications.The security department will deploy officials
with handheld receivers with a BLE gateway device to search
for missing persons in the targeted area.Considering the
importance of the safety of residents and visiting pilgrims in
Madinah, in this paper, we propose a smart city application
design for tracking and locating the missing person using an
emerging Internet of Things (IoT) based system.We propose
to evaluate the performance of Bluetooth low energy (BLE),
low power wide area network (LPWAN), technologies, both
individually and as a hybrid solution.The majority of reported cases include chil-
dren, then elderly women, men, and people with disabilities
and disorders.The department of lost and found in Masjid-
e-Nabavi in Madinah follows a manual system to report and
locate missing persons with the help of police personnel.To deal with these issue, we investigate the two major
low power technologies BLE [9] and loRaWAN [5] emerged
in the last few years for various IoT application use cases.LoRaWAN allows a wide range of private
network deployment with easy interactions with various types
of IoT devices.Internet of Things sensors with analytics
is playing a vital role in providing smart city solutions.1.