An Integrated Visual Signalling, Localisation & Health Monitoring System for Soldier Assistance

To strengthen the security system of a nation, ensuring the safety, whereabouts and healthy body condition of the soldiers is very important. An indoor/outdoor network between the soldiers is effective in terms of informing everyone in the network if anyone is missing or suffering from bad health conditions or if someone wants to communicate with others beyond eyesight. This paper describes the design and implementation of a low-cost embedded system developed for smart soldier assistance, the systems incorporate a gesture recognition based visual signaling, an Ultra Wide Band (UWB) based indoor and short-range outdoor localization and physiological parameter monitoring modules. The modules combined together help in creating a network which is used to track fellow soldiers location and alert messages based on the gesture and health parameters. The gesture recognition module consists of a glove built of flex and IMU sensors; the health monitoring devices comprise of ECG, Temperature and PPG; and the UWB based communication is responsible for alert messaging and indoor localization.