Cerberus: A Novel Alerting System for Flood, Fire, and Air Quality

According to the NHTSA, an average of 384 fatalities occur annually in the United States due to drowning while driving. The California wildfires in 2017 caused a property loss of $13 billion, 46 lives, and injuries to hundreds more. Most of the current alerting mechanisms are expensive and deficient in features for detecting floods at road crossings, wildfires, and air quality. The current fire alerting systems cost thousands of dollars, but they are not multi-purpose and compatible with smart city infrastructure. Also, the current flood alerting systems cost tens of thousands of dollars, are radio frequency-based, and require large antennas, but only provide a limited range. This paper proposes an innovative system, Cerberus, to provide early warnings for fires, floods, and air quality using an IoT device, sensors, cloud, and mobile technologies. The solution provides a Red-Yellow-Green light system for local alerts and a mobile app to alert users about unsafe water levels, fire, and air quality. All the data collected by Cerberus is stored in the cloud and used for other types of alerts such as voice calls, text alerts, and emails. The Cerberus warning system is low-cost, accurate, easy to maintain, and scalable to thousands of locations. The warning system is also integrated with an analytics platform that shows trends and historical data. The prototype was validated in the field using real data. The results show that Cerberus is a viable solution for providing accurate and reliable alerts for floods, wildfires, and air quality.