Alternative Communication System for Emergency Situations

This paper describes the process of designing, building, and implementing a communication system to be used in a catastrophic situation. The system is an additional tool for emergency teams, that let them interchange text messages using LORA wireless communication, track the rescuer ubication, and send all this information to the cloud in order to generate reports, monitor the rescuer's vital signs, and centralize and visualize the information throughout a web application. The system is composed of three sensor nodes and one master node, a sensor node has three elements an ECG sensor to monitor the heart rhythm of the rescuer person, a Heltec LoRa 32 device to process the sensor signal, the text messages, and transmit the information to the other sensor nodes by LoRa digital wireless radio frequency technology and finally a smartphone that acts as an interface between the Heltec Lora 32 device and the rescuer person. On the other hand, the master node has the function that works as a gateway to send the information to the cloud and corresponds to other Heltec LoRa 32 device in other configuration. The system was tested with three sensor nodes and one master node, and the maximum distance was 810 meters and the percentage of the data stored in the cloud was 91%. Index Terms-Communication system, LORA, sensor node.