MOBILE-BASED SOCIAL DISTANCING AWARENESS SYSTEM INTEGRATED WITH GPS SENSOR: A CASE STUDY OF UMP STUDENTS

Abstract

Social distancing is becoming a norm in everyone’s daily life due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic has only started two years ago, there are not many social distancing awareness systems specifically made for higher education institutions (HEI) students. As many students are required to return to the campus to partake in physical lessons and assessment, social distancing practice is very important to reduce the risk of spreading of the viruses. Social Distancing Awareness System is a mobile application that helps students to increase their social distancing awareness. The objective of this research is to alert users to practise social distancing by developing a proposed system called mobile application for social distancing awareness. The proposed system applies the agile model of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) as the methodology for this work. The proposed system will detect nearby devices using GPS and save the location of detection coordinates. The system will generate reports for social distancing scores to show students’ records of their social distancing practice. The risk of the detected device is categorised based on the distance between user coordinates. The closer the device to the students, the higher the risk and shall be able to get detection details sent by GPS sensors. The system will send notifications to the students’ devices to warn them about their surroundings. Conclusively, the findings from this work are described as follows; the system is able to generate a social distancing report score based on the detection log to provide statistics to UMP students on their social distancing practices. Thus, the social distancing awareness has been increased. The proposed system was found to be a useful application for the social distancing detection in order to ensure that one of the SOPs during the COVID-19 pandemics is performed by students.