Muthoni Masinde

The role of ICTs in downscaling and up-scaling integrated weather forecasts for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa

Despite global advancements in technology and inter-trade volumes, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only Region where cases of hunger have increased since 1990. Rampant and frequent droughts are one of the major causes of this. Monumental and mostly donor-funded projects have been mounted to counter this but with little success. One of the latest strategies being experimented is a community-based early warning system that seeks to integrate indigenous knowledge with western climate science. This initiative is informed by the realization that, though crucial, weather forecast information provided by the national meteorological departments has little utilization amongst small-scale farmers. Though having generated promising results, the integration project still faces the challenges of scaling up across communities as well as the lack of micro-level weather data. In this paper, we describe how the adoption of mobile phones and wireless sensor networks technology is being used to address these two challenges. Use of denser wireless sensor networks to collect local weather data and mobile phones to disseminate forecasts brings information closer to the farmers that need it most. To ensure that the non-mystical aspects of indigenous knowledge are portable across communities, language technologies (part of artificial intelligence) are used in the design of our system.

A framework for predicting droughts in developing countries using sensor networks and mobile phones

Drought is the most complex and least understood of all natural disasters and it affects more people than any other hazard. Droughts have become synonymous with the developing countries and in particular the Sub-Saharan Africa where the hazard is chronic. Effects of droughts can be mitigated if accurate and timely drought predications were to be done. Unfortunately, despite the enormous advancements in science, predictions only provide indications of trends. A major weakness of the existing tools is the emphasis on macro/international level information. The tools also tend to ignore the at risk community who happen to be host to very crucial traditional knowledge on droughts. In this paper, we propose an integrated drought predication framework that considers both scientific and traditional knowledge and combines the use of mobile phones with wireless sensor networks to be able to capture and relay micro drought parameters. The framework is an enhancement of ITUs Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) Layers. In order to accommodate the diverse roles mobile phones play in our framework, Layer 2 (USN Access Networking) is implemented using three sub-layers composed of heterogeneous gateways.

An innovative drought early warning system for sub-Saharan Africa : integrating modern and indigenous approaches

Droughts remain the number one disaster in Africa; drought is responsible for over 88% of all the types of disasters that people are affected by. An effective drought early warning system can support appropriate mitigation and preparedness strategies and hence minimise these effects. Existing systems tend to ignore the ‘at risk’ community and are faced with a number of implementation challenges; their utilisation is very low. This paper describes an innovative drought early warning system that integrates indigenous and scientific drought forecasting approaches. The system is anchored on a novel integration framework called ITIKI (acronym for Information Technology and Indigenous Knowledge with Intelligence). Indigenous knowledge ensures that the system is relevant, acceptable and resilient. ITIKI further employs three ICTs (mobile phones, wireless sensor networks and artificial intelligence) to enhance the systems effectiveness, affordability, sustainability and intelligence. This paper describes the ITIKIs architecture as well as the design, development and evaluation of the drought early warning system.

Implementation of middleware for Internet of Things in asset tracking applications: In-lining approach

Asset tracking systems developed around the Internet of Things paradigm are composed of a collection of various objects interconnected by different communication technologies. Each of these devices function through local and/or remote interaction with the real world or other devices and systems. The problem of ensuring a dependable and responsive middleware that is capable of handling and servicing such devices, process voluminous data without compromising responsiveness is still eminent. In this paper, we present a solution that was designed using in-lining approach to deliver a middleware that acts as an insulator for hiding the internal workings of the asset tracking system prototype by providing homogenous and abstract environment to the highest layers. In order to evaluate the middleware, a laptop tracking and monitoring system that integrates various internet of things components (at least 4 components: RFIDs, wireless sensors, mobile phones and biometric readers) was implemented and tested within a university environment.

IoT applications that work for the African continent: Innovation or adoption?

The realisation of the Internet of Things is driven by several enabling technologies needed for identification, sensing and communication. These include the Internet itself, Radio Frequency Identifiers and wireless sensor networks. Africa has not kept pace with technology advancements; the Continent continues to contend for the last position in virtually all technology spheres. In the Information and Communications Technology sector for instance, Africa has only 7% of her households on the Internet; this is far behind the worlds figure of 41%. However, all is not that dim; there is some evidence that the Continent can be on forefront to some technology advancements. As the worlds researchers and businesses rush to unfold Internet of Things, it would be valuable to pose the question; “given Africas pronounced lag in the baseline technology needed to implement Internet of Things, should the Continent go for adoption or innovation?” By choosing innovation at this early stage of the developments in the Internet of Things, the author argues that Africa will avoid the famous problem of “transferring of Northern designs to Southern realities”. Taking the case of a drought early warning and assets tracking systems, the author demonstrates that by innovatively incorporating the realities such as the prevalence of African indigenous knowledge on weather, unreliable communication, low-end mobile phone handsets, among others, a home-grown Internet of Things flavour has higher chance of succeeding.

Towards Semantic Integration of Heterogeneous Sensor Data with Indigenous Knowledge for Drought Forecasting

In the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, various heterogeneous ubiquitous devices would be able to connect and communicate with each other seamlessly, irrespective of the domain. Semantic representation of data through detailed standardized annotation has shown to improve the integration of the interconnected heterogeneous devices. However, the semantic representation of these heterogeneous data sources for environmental monitoring systems is not yet well supported. To achieve the maximum benefits of IoT for drought forecasting, a dedicated semantic middleware solution is required. This research proposes a middleware that semantically represents and integrates heterogeneous data sources with indigenous knowledge based on a unified ontology for an accurate IoT-based drought early warning system (DEWS).

MobiGrid: A middleware for integrating mobile phone and grid computing

The popularity and the high processing power of todays smart phones have presented computer scientists with a fertile platform on which to implement grid computing for mobile phones. Such grids will not require much investment since they are designed to make use of ‘idle’ power on already existing phones. This is because most smart phone users only use their phones for a few minutes or a few hours every day and yet, these phones are powered up 24/7. These kinds of grids are most favorable to developing countries where the penetration of mobile phone exceeds other forms of ICTs. Once in place, the grids can then be utilized to run the much-needed applications such e-health, e-education and drought prediction. In this paper, we present MobiGrid, a middleware for mobile phone grid that is part of a larger research project that aims at integrating mobile phones and sensors to come up with a drought predication tool for use in the developing countries. MobiGrid is an API on which distributed applications can be built. Unlike the rest of grid middleware solutions, the uniqueness of our approach lies in the fact that the middleware is for mobile phones environment.

An assessment of field readiness for wireless sensor based weatherboards — A calibration report

The ability to provide timely, reliable and relevant weather forecasts by the National Meteorological Services in most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is hampered by among other things, the lack of adequate coverage by weather stations. The cost of acquiring and running such stations is beyond reach of many governments in this Region and alternative technologies such as the sensor-based weather stations have been identified as one way of addressing this problem. Although these sensors could extend the weather network coverage and eventually enhance weather forecasting, the acceptability of such data by the meteorologists is only possible if the sensors are calibrated and their field readiness evaluated. This paper is a calibration report towards this end; it details a rigorous assessment of sensor-based weatherboards along three factors: (1) calibration (lag, random, and systematic) errors; (2) effects of enclosing the boards in an enclosure constructed from perspex material; and (3) battery depletion rates. The results indicated that although calibration errors could be corrected by appropriately programming the boards, and battery depletion by the use of flexible micro-solar panels, the sensor boards described in this paper were not ready for use in the field until an enclosure designed with the input of meteorologists was put in place.

Extending the Power of Mobile Phone Using Service Oriented Computing

In 2009, only 3.6% of Kenya’s households owned at least one computer; conversely, 63.2% of households owned at least one mobile phone; this is true for many developing countries of Africa. This implies that computing solutions that target mobile phone environments are bound to have greater impact in these countries. However, the inherent constraints of mobile phones present a challenge in implementing viable applications. One solution to this would be to adopt Service Oriented and/or Grid Computing on mobile phones. In this paper, we present results that demonstrate how Service Oriented Computing can enable computation on mobile phones. A java-based questionnaire was implemented as a set of services aimed at overcoming phones’ storage limitation. This was achieved via a middleware that was implemented to manage the services; communication among the services running on different phones was via Bluetooth.

Development of adaptive environmental management system: A participatory approach through fuzzy cognitive maps

Mining industries develop environmental management systems/plans to mitigate the impact their operations has on the society. Even with these plans, there are still issues of pollution affecting the society. Though there are ICT-based pollution monitoring solutions, their use is dismal due to lack of appreciation or understanding of the disseminated information. This result in mining communities depending on their own local knowledge to observe, monitor and predict mining-related environmental pollution. However, this local knowledge has never been tested scientifically or analysed to recognize its usability or effectiveness. Mining companies tend to ignore this knowledge from the communities as it is treated like common information with no much scientific value. As a step towards verifying or validating this local knowledge, we demonstrate how fuzzy cognitive maps can be used to model, analyse and represent this linguistic local knowledge.