Umudike Journal of Engineering and Technology

Given the disturbing rate of breaches in security caused by unlawful intrusions and fire outbreaks in domestic and industrial habitats, especially when property users are absent, viz-a-viz recent advancements in technology, it becomes increasingly pertinent to deploy remote safety monitoring systems to extensively minimize safety hazards. In this paper, we describe a safety monitoring system that can be used to remotely monitor homes and industrial properties to detect unlawful intrusions and abnormal environmental conditions. The system is inbuilt with an SMS alert subsystem to indicate security breaches, an on-site display function using a liquid crystal display (LCD), and a web-based graphing and display function to provide real-time status updates of sensed data. The system was tested two ways; the first test was used to assess the basic functionality of the sensors making up the sensing section in active mode, while the second test evaluated the reliability of the transmitting section in terms of time taken for SMS delivery (using the four mobile networks in Nigeria) and information update on the webserver. The system proved to be functional and effective, but requires improvements in reliability functions to accommodate poor quality of service and network distribution.