لخّصلي

Abstract—Ensuring the safety of residents and visitors is
one of the major priorities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
(KSA). 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. 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. 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.
We present our proposed smart city application design and its
implementation scenarios in Madinah.
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. Internet of Things sensors with analytics
is playing a vital role in providing smart city solutions.
According to a report [1], the total expected investment in
smart city initiatives worldwide has increased from 81 billion
to 189.3 billion USD from 2018 to 2023 as shown in Fig. 1.
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. 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. These sets of groups
include children, elderly people, and people with disabilities
or disorders. 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. Madinah alongside Makkah receives millions of
visiting pilgrims for Umrah and Hajj throughout the year. A
news report in [8] indicates that thousands of them get lost or
separated from their companion around Masjid-e-Nabavi and Masjid Al Haram. 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. There
are other scenarios where residents of Madinah could get lost
in crowds, such as, during a football match, or in a market.
Considering the importance of this issue of missing person and
the future vision of the kingdom, in this paper, we propose a
smart city application using emerging IoT technologies.
A. Existing System
We will now briefly define the working of the existing
system and the process to deal with missing person issues
for both residents and visiting pilgrims in Madinah. When
a resident from a vulnerable group is known to be missing,
his/her caretaker has two options to report: 1) By physically
visiting the police station or approaching an available police
officer on-site, or 2) By dialing emergency number 999. In case
a visiting pilgrim goes missing, the caretaker reports to either
a security official or to the department of lost and found in
Masjid-e-Nabavi. However, most of the visitors are not aware
of this service according to our survey done with a sample of
pilgrims in Masjid-e-Nabavi. The major process of the existing
system is shown in Fig.2. The existing system has major
limitations as there is no online system available for residents
and visiting pilgrims to report a missing person. 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. The
security officials in Masjid-e-Nabavi are using a general social
media group to communicate the missing person’s report they
receive from pilgrims. Considering these limitations, we are
motivated to propose IoT based solutions for this problem in
this paper.
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.
BLE beacons providing a viable solution for IoT devices
implementation in a wide range of applications. Mainly due to
their low energy consumption, reliable signal detection with
advanced BLE gateway devices, and accurate distance estima-
tion methods. These inherited advantages of BLE technology
motivates us to use it for tracking and locating missing per-
sons. 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. These features give advantage to BLE technology
as compared to well-established GPS based technology which
requires the Internet. LoRaWAN allows a wide range of private
network deployment with easy interactions with various types
of IoT devices. Since its emergence in 2015, the research
community has investigated its suitability for various IoT
uses cases including smart city scenarios. Its protocols ensure
reliable communication at the wider range and is one of the
reasons, we selected this to study in our proposal.
We propose an application for two safety issues: 1) Track
the companion of a missing person in case a security official
found him/her, 2) Track the location of a reported missing
person using emerging IoT technologies. The proposed so-
lution integrates both apps in IoT devices to enable efficient
tracking and locating missing persons. The security department
will keep a record of residents and visitors who belong to any
of the sets of vulnerable groups including their details and
biometric features, such as, fingerprints. For the first issue,
when a security officer finds a person who is lost then he will
use the proposed app in an IoT device to capture his biometric
and send it to the control room through a web service. We aim
to propose an efficient identification algorithm to identify the
companion of a lost person. To deal with the second issue,
we propose a tracking technology that uses a bracelet, which
generates Bluetooth beacon signals. It will be mandatory for
vulnerable people to wear this bracelet when going out, in
case they forget their path, children disaffiliated with their
parents in a gathering, or people with disorder forget their
home/hotel and/or identity. If the police department did not
find the reported person in a given time then they will start the
search operation. The security department will deploy officials
with handheld receivers with a BLE gateway device to search
for missing persons in the targeted area.
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. The proposed system
will provide public safety in two major issues: 1) Track the
companion of a missing person in case a security official found
him/her, 2) Track the location of a reported missing person
using the latest IoT sensor. The proposed system is for large
gatherings in Madinah , however, with certain changes it can
be later applied to other scenarios
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We briefly
review the related literature and performed gap analysis in Section 2. In section 3, we propose our smart city application
design and methodology. Then, we present the implementation
scenarios of proposed application design in Madinah in section
4. Finally, we summarize our work in paper with future
research direction in section 5