Open Innovation Platform for IoT-Big Data in Sub-Sahara Africa

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - WAZIUP (Open Innovation Platform for IoT-Big Data in Sub-Sahara Africa)

Période du rapport: 2018-02-01 au 2019-01-31

WAZIUP, namely “Open Innovation Platform for IoT-Big Data in Sub-Saharan Africa”, is an ambitious research project. The name is from the Swahili: “WAZI” means open. Its aim is to accelerate innovation in Africa through cutting edge IoT, cost-effective communication and big data technologies. It is an open source project addressing the IoT needs and demand of the developing countries. It proposes to develop an IoT and Big-data PaaS platform in the context of Africa in order to offer value-added cost effective, reliable and energy efficient services. The project offers the benefit for African Developer on lower entry level on innovation.First WAZIUP operates by involving farmers and breeders in order to define the platform specifications in focused validation cases. Second, it engages the flourishing ICT ecosystem in those countries by fostering new tools and good practices, entrepreneurship and start-ups. Aimed at boosting the ICT sector, WAZIUP proposes solutions aiming at long term sustainability. WAZIUP will offer various tools for the engagement of the communities:
• Engaging the most well-known innovation spaces in Africa
• Organizing a series of Hackathons and startup weekends
In order to address the vision and goal of the WAZIUP the following specific objectives are identified:
• To develop/adapt low-cost and energy-efficient open hardware (e.g. sensor/actuator) meeting African needs
• To design and develop narrow-band low power and low cost IoT networking infrastructure (e.g. LoraWAN), including both long and short range coverage
• To develop and validate the open IoT and Big data PaaS platform
• To experiment the WAZIUP platform through African rural applications
• WAZIUP test-bed: Integrated WAZIUP platform will be deployed in Africa to test value-added applications
• To validate Open IoT and Big data PaaS business model in the context of developing countries like in Africa

The WAZIUP IoT low cost and energy efficient communication platform is released for pilot deployment. The platform includes two parts: i) LoRa sensor node and ii) LoRa Gateway. The LoRa Sensor node is based on open hardware Arduino and LoRa Gateway is based on open hardware Raspberry-pi. However, WAZIUP LoRa sensor library support various Arduino compatible boards. It also supports several LoRa module so far available in the markets. The Gateway software framework allows to configure the Gateway from remotely with the internet connection. The Gateway supports MQTT as well as REST APIs to push the data to the cloud. WAZUIP LoRa platform is used by WAZIUP MVPs and deployed in different pilot sites.

We created a Cloud platform able to collect the data from the sensors, to store it, to display it and finally to analyse it. The Cloud platform has a user-friendly web and mobile interfaces. It is used by many actors inside and outside of the project, such as for hackathons, bootcamps, pilots, startups and entrepreneurs. During the reporting period, we updated the security aspects, the data models, the dashboard, created new APIs and finally created automatic tests for quality insurance. Novelties include MQTT, actuation, gateway management, sensors calibration, better search capacity, better sensors management, sensor ontologies, improved database management procedures and deployment techniques. As of 2019, the platform has reached its second major release. It has 500 user subscriptions and is actively used, with 318 sensors created.

We also developed the WAZIFARM platform that is an application platform for various farming sectors. End-users of different domains can benefit from several features of WAZIFARM in order to have a fully-fledged visualization application and analytics dashboard. This tool is free to use for development of applications. It is fully integrated with WAZIUP cloud platform. For instance, a developer, or an entrepreneur can use this tool for rapid development of farming application. Within few hours, you can develop your own farming applications dashboard.

The WAZIUP developed five MVPs. These are soil moisture monitoring, weather station, water quality in the fish farm, cattle rustling and urban waste. These applications are developed based on the sensing and cloud platform. Each of the MVPs is deployed in several real-life pilot environments. The agriculture application demonstrates in 5 pilot sites: UGB farm, Senegal (tomatoes crops, Kiara and Mongol), Urbanatic Gardens, Togo (Vegetables), Nasso site, Burkina Faso (banana), DKC farm Ghana, Peace &Love vegetable farm (Ghana). The cattle farm is demonstrated in UGB CIMEL, the fish farming in 4 locations, Kumah Farm (Ghana), Lazarus farm (Ghana), Comoe dam (Burkina Faso) and Ndiawdoune site (Senegal). The Urban waste pilot is demonstrated in Togo.

Last but not least, WAZIUP organized conference, workshop, and innovation events in order to promote and exploit the technologies in wider impact in the African context.

WAZIUP will also accelerate social innovation and empower local entrepreneurship in Africa by coupling cutting edge IoT and Big Data open and cost-effective technological solutions. WAZIUP is going to progress beyond the start of the art of these technologies by designing and developing a specialized solution for the African young entrepreneurs and developer’s communities. The current IoT and big data solutions in the market are either too generic or designed for targeting developed countries. However, the needs for developing countries like Africa are very different, in terms of energy, connectivity, cost and simple users interfaces which are all still a major issue. Hence the WAZIUP is expected to address the African cost effectiveness needs while preparing the playground to easily adopt future technological waves and solve concrete current/future needs of the West Sub-Saharan countries.

WAZIUP will exploit a low-cost and energy efficient out-of-box IoT sensing system including long-range communication, IoT gateway platform, IoT cloud platform and WAZIFARM application platform. WAZIUP will transfer locally such know how by training developers through use case and reference examples. The platform is designed to take into account the African conditions in terms of unreliable internet access, therefore we proposed the architecture with local and global cloud services capability. The local cloud can also provide some WAZIUP services without an internet connection. The concept of local cloud is realized with IoT edge computing concept.

The ultimate impact of WAZIUP is to foster innovation and to develop community of users. With fully open source hardware and software platforms, WAZIUP will foster the creation of the young developer community in Africa. The young developer community will use the WAZIUP open source code and APIs to save solutions development and deployment time. The project will use multiple tools for community building like innovation week, hackatons, start-up week, a series of webinars, etc. Multiple events will be organised with our innovation hubs partners to mobilize all African talents to use such opportunity to innovate and develop business activities solving even further countries problems (e.g. for agriculture, farms, health, water). WAZIUP will support African young entrepreneur to develop start-up with based on WAZIUP solutions.

WAZIUP Cloud Software architecture

Software platform deployment

WAZIFARM Dashboard

Cattle Collar v2.0

WAZIUP Mobile deployment assistance

Fish Farming buoy v2.0

MVP Weather station

MVP in Fish farming

Soil humidity V2.0

WAZIUP stand in ITU

MVP on Urban waste

MVP on Cattle

WAZIUP Gateway deployment in Senegal

WAZIUP MVP V3.0

Weather station v2.0

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - WAZIUP (Open Innovation Platform for IoT-Big Data in Sub-Sahara Africa)

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