The Development of an Internet of Things Mobile Application for Tracking an Electric Bus in a Campus

To reach the idea of data science for the Internet of Things (IoT) innovation, we believe that if we can collect data from our daily life activities such as our commuting data from a bus system based on IoT. We can add values to this collected data using, for example, machine learning or data analysis and statistics. However, we need to enable the system to be able to measure our daily life's activities. As an example of such a system, this research demonstrates how to apply the IoT technology to track an electrical bus status of a mass transit system in a university. We develop a mobile application to show the information of the bus on a smartphone. The information can be alerted to a user or passenger in real-time. This information includes an estimated waiting time until the bus reaches a user, the number of passengers on board, and the current bus's position on the route in Google Maps. The mobile application can help a passenger to decide and manage the right journeys to travel in the university. The application was developed on the Android platform with many technologies including an Arduino integrated development environment or IDE, Google Maps application programming interface or API, a global positioning system or GPS module, ThingSpeak cloud, and infrared distance sensors. The 30 passengers evaluated the satisfaction survey. The survey mainly includes the accuracy of the tracking and alerting processes. The results are that the passengers were delighted with the processes. The evaluation related values are following. The mean is 4.91, and the standard deviation or SD is 0.29 or representing as 98.20%. To sum up, the application in this research can provide an example of mobile application development with current and available technologies such as IoT and cloud in the disruptive era to enhance applications in a transportation or others domain.