20/21
Champion

RIform
(Reform by Informed)

Recycling Smartphones as IoT Devices to Build a Data Driven Campus

Members:

Tianmeng Tie, Letian Yu, Yu Chen, Jiaxin Huang

Project Aims

  • To promote recycling and repurposing of old smartphones
  • To optimize the timetable and scheduling of the school bus service

Key Challenges
With the rapid development of mobile technologies and enhanced production quality, people are becoming more reliant on smartphones. Many sources suggest that the average lifespan of a smartphone is only about 2.5 years. According to experts at the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum, if people do not properly recycle their smartphones, 5.3 billion of them will have ended up in landfills by the end of 2022. Their combined height, if stacked flat on top of each other, would be 120 times as high as the International Space Station. Recycling old smartphones is therefore necessary if we care about our planet.
Solutions
This project repurposes old smartphones as IoT devices and deploys them to create a data-driven campus that is safer, more efficient and future-proof. The project team built a mobile application (app) hosted on a cloud-service platform that can process, visualize and store data. The team also developed a real-time school bus tracking feature in which a smartphone on the bus sends real-time GPS data to the cloud, providing users with an accurate estimated time of arrival (ETA), thus allowing them to better manage their schedule via app. The recycled devices can also monitor the number of people on the bus, thus generating data to optimize bus scheduling.
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Apps Download

Apps Download