IoT-Enhanced Transport and Monitoring of Medicine Using Sensors, MQTT, and Secure Short Message Service

Abstract

Since its inception more than a decade ago, Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been guiding people in the development of a world full of smart solutions in which all devices and physical objects, represented as "things," are interlinked with sensors using the Internet. In some areas, the delivery of medications to patients or receivers at their destinations remains highly informal and old. In smart medicine delivery, the medicine needs to maintain its original state while facing multiple environmental factors, like temperature fluctuations, humidity, etc. This paper presents an effective implementation of IoT (Internet of Things) for monitoring the transportation of medicines and vaccines, along with temperature control facilitated through mobile applications and sensor networks. The system employs mobile applications as the user interface, utilizes Arduino, MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) for communication, incorporates a temperature sensor, and employs a mini portable cooling box. Designed for the generalized delivery of medicines/vaccines from sender to receiver, the system also suggests CRC-32 as an optimal algorithm for error detection instead of complex hash functions such as MD5 and SHA, ensuring better performance, smooth operation, and data integrity. In addition, elliptic curve based shared keys are used for protected data transmission. The accuracy of the proposed system is 89.88%, and the value of the F1-score is 0.686, which is greater than the threshold of 0.5, hence conclusively validating the authenticity and reliability of the proposed system.