Fostering information through remotely controllable novel device for rural areas Ankur Verma and S. P. Singh Division of Electronics and Communication Engineering Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi [email protected], [email protected] Abstract: In Indian rural villages, the people are poor and live in unhygienic conditions. The problem is further aggravated by inappropriate medical facilities. Even after myriad of government efforts, modern technology has failed to create an impact on the villages. Poverty and lack of information in rural areas has forced the people to migrate to cities. This paper presents a system that could alleviate this problem and help in providing information to rural communities. With this system, it becomes possible to display content remotely with the help of a device deployed in rural areas and alter the information by the help of public or mobile phones from any place all over the world. Keywords: decoder, microcontroller, global system for mobile communications, dual tone multi-frequency, sensors

I. Introduction In India 60% of rural population (~ 400 million) live in primitive conditions with no electricity and use primitive cooking stoves. People are poor and are living in unhygienic condition i.e., unclean water, poor nutrition, sub-human habitats and degraded and unsanitary environments. There is lack of medical facilities in the rural areas. Poverty in rural areas has resulted in suicides of large number of farmers. There is a large scale migration in search of employments towards the urban area. Modern technology has not touched their lives even after 60 years of independence. Illiteracy rate is over 40% [1], thus it becomes an intimidating task to bring the fruits of new Information Technology (IT) to people, especially for rural India which has nearly 700 million people [2]. Conventional methods for delivering information in rural areas include Television, Public Radio etc. but they suffer from the drawback of being unable to cater to customized information for small communities and also involve large production costs. According to a recent study, it has been found that 78% of people living in rural India are not even acquainted with Internet [3]. Thus at present it is a challenge to develop a system that would bring to the people customized information that they need without imposing any limitation like illiteracy and money. This paper presents a system which is cheap and could be easily deployed. It is organized as follows. Section II is devoted for the general description of the system. Section III elaborates the application of this technique in developing the rural areas. Section IV gives the conclusion.

II. System Overview The system shown in Figure 1 is capable of acquiring, authenticating and delivering information and can be deployed in small communities like villages. It consists of a central unit which is the microcontroller based remote control circuit which is connected to a display unit and takes input from a DTMF decoder chip. This chip decodes DTMF signal, sends output to the microcontroller based device, which then processes and displays the data. There is a pass key through which is initially needed for authentication purpose. When the ‘pass key’ has been entered

correctly, the controller gives the right to display data. Both pass key and information to be

displayed is transmitted via telephone line (in case of landline telephone) or electromagnetic waves (in case of mobile phone) as DTMF signal.

Fig. 1 Block diagram of System Anybody who has GSM and public phone can send the signal and hence, access the controller by calling the phone number to which microcontroller based remote controller is connected. The following part explains the step by step working of the system: i.

After the user presses the keys of the telephone or mobile phone, a DTMF signal frequency is generated corresponding to key pressed as shown in Figure 2. This DTMF signal reaches the remotely deployed system.

Fig. 2 Keypad with 12 keys and frequencies (Hz) ii.

Remotely deployed system is directly connected to telephone line with the help of an interfacing circuit consisting of DTMF decoder IC [8] and some passive components like resistors, capacitors [9]. DTMF decoder IC detects DTMF signal coming via telephone line and converts the corresponding signal into

respective BCD number. (This DTMF signal was sent by the user who is pressing the corresponding keys of his telephone/mobile to generate signal frequencies as explained in i) BCD number is sent to the microcontroller based device, which then processes and displays the data on the display device which can either be a liquid crystal display (LCD) or a LED matrix display. If the information is not changed for a certain time period, there is also an option of connecting sensors to remotely deployed system which can display relevant information pertaining to a specific area such as temperature and humidity conditions. Thus, even if the user is unable to enter or get the updated information, the system is autonomous enough to display the latest information on its own.

iii. iv.

Implementation and User Interface: The circuit for controlling remote devices with the help of DTMF tones had already been implemented and is well explained here [9]. The innovation in our work lies in the use of this device for providing information to rural areas which has never been done before. For aggregating this device with our system, the remote system is interfaced with the microcontroller based device which further gives commands to liquid crystal display (LCD) or a LED matrix display for the user interface. The text to be displayed can only be controlled by an authentic person who will be in charge of many such devices deployed in the rural areas. He will have the passwords of all such devices, thus proper security will be maintained.

III.

Applications

The information can be classified into following categories pertaining to the location [4] [7]:

1. Agriculture and Allied Services: (i) Information regarding new techniques for selection of proper land, use of improved high yielding variety of seeds, use of better techniques evolved, buying of seeds, use of fertilizers to post harvest processing to farmers and proper water management, thus helping them increase agricultural production. (ii) Real time information to farmers on crop prices, thus enabling farmers to sell their produce at the best possible rates and reevaluate the role of corrupt middlemen

2. Health (i) Delivery of health related services (ii) Delivery of timely and State of the art emergency medical services (iii) Health Alerts

3. Schools and Colleges (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

Results notification, Attendance record, Assessment deadlines, and Other urgent administrative details.

4. Others Information regarding Local Weather Reports, Employment Exchanges for Jobs, Buying and Selling, Telemedicine and Financial Services, development of tourism by online booking as well as planning entire trips for visitors can be provided.

The system could further be used to display real time information acquired by the sensors which can be deployed depending upon the information needed. For example: Humidity sensors could be used for displaying Relative humidity which could further be used to drive fans/coolers to bring the humidity to a desired value which can be set up remotely with the help of DTMF tones.

IV. Conclusions Initiatives such as Internet kiosks [5], Media Lab Asia’s DakNet [6], video conferencing and numerous other efforts have been taken by the Government of India in the past for delivering information to rural communities. The system presented in this paper is a cheap and versatile alternative to all the options presented above, which is envisioned as a way to reach out each and every rural community of India and to help them provide them customized information.

References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/in.html http://www.blonnet.com/2003/11/28/stories/2003112800260900.htm LIRNEasia (Learning Initiatives on Reforms for Network Economies - Asia) and AC Nielsen Study over Literacy rate in India. http://www.medcindia.org/cgibin/Maharashtra%20vision%202010/Presentations/Mr.%20Guru%20Malladi.ppt http://www.netinst.org/Kendall_Singh.pdf http://courses.media.mit.edu/2003fall/de/DakNet-Case.pdf Ankur Verma et.al. “Using Technology to Automate Education”, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning (USA), Vol. 4, No. 9, pp. 29-45, Sep. 2007. CM8870C DTMF Decoder Datasheet, http://www.calmicro.com/products/data/pdf/ cm8870.pdf http://electrosofts.com/dtmf/index.html