Gaja-Mithuru: Smart Elephant Monitoring and Tracking System

Abstract

In the past few years, a considerable number of villages bordering elephant populated areas of Sri Lanka have been continuously facing the dire effects of the Human-Elephant conflict. With the expanding human settlements in those natural habitats, the sources of food and water for elephants have gradually diminished over time. Therefore, animals are forced to attack crops. The consequent attacks on the villages cause a steady rise in human and elephant casualties. Within such a context, the existing methods of mitigating the human-elephant conflict have proven to be less effective as they often employ intrusive and harmful methods to ward off elephant threats. Thus, this proposal will focus on a monitoring method that is both nonintrusive and nonharmful to both humans and elephants using IoT technologies. To achieve the said objective, a method is proposed mean to detect elephants, monitor their behavior, and identify elephants' future attacks through seismic data related to elephants and GPS data and notify villages in advance. The data were captured using a hardware setup which includes geophones, circuits for amplification and filtering, and GSM modules for data communication. This method achieved a high accuracy in detecting elephant.