Globally, IoT applications are emerging exponentially with various functionalities to automatically monitor, control the environment, and manage various tasks. This research aims to address various challenges facing marine small sailing boat transportation in Zanzibar by establishing an IoT solution to track and monitor sailing boats at Zanzibar seashore. Zanzibar people use the Indian Ocean for transportation, entertainment, fishing, and tourism activities, and the most popular sailing vessels they use are boats that are traveling in various maritime areas. The interviews with Zanzibar maritime authority (ZMA) officials and the ICT Manager revealed that ZMA does not have a proper monitoring and tracking system for small boats and other local vessels. The existing tracking system based on global AIS only focuses on tracking and monitoring big ships traveling locally and abroad. Hence, the absence of a smart monitoring and tracking system for small sailing boats may increase unwanted consequences that could also jeopardize the lives of those inside the boats once the accident or malicious activities happen like collision and leakage in the boat. Therefore, this research project proposed an IoT-based system that will address the existing challenges.
The proposed platform envisaged to facilitate a safe environment for both passengers and the boatmen by providing an early warning before a collision occurs, alert message in case of water leakage, and transmitting real-time about the boats’ movement. The following technologies are used to design this system, GPS, water detector sensor, ultrasonic sensor, buzzer, Arduino UNO, Bluetooth, and GSM module. This project’s output is an IoT system, which will continuously monitor a moving boat and report its status. For doing so, the Arduino Uno interfaced with sensors together with a buzzer and Bluetooth. The Bluetooth is used to send collected data to GSM using peer to peer communication. The water sensor detects the presence of water inside the boat, once the water is detected, the system automatically sends an alert message to the user. The user will also view the position of the boat through a mobile device. The system also uses an ultrasonic sensor for measuring the proximity between the boat and obstacle; if the boat approaches the obstacle, the buzzer starts to ring until the boat is in a safe position. The GSM used GPRS and TCP/IP protocol to send data in a database at the same time to send alert messages to the mobile phone. The designed IoT system simulated using the Proteus design suite, and then the prototype was developed using physical devices. A mobile app named “ZMA APP” is also part of the physical experimental setup. A user uses this app to receive an alert message once the boat gets leakage. Overall, the proposed system will enhance the efficiency of ZMA, especially on tracking and monitoring small boats and communication between boat and marine port authority.