Smart & Sustainable Mobility on Campus: A secure IoT tracking system for the BIRA Bicycle

Changing mobility behaviors in academia - such as encouraging the use of bicycles - can help to reduce CO2 emissions since trips made by car or motorbikes tend to effectively reduce. Additionally, by obtaining mobility-related data we can infer patterns, optimize mobility and strengthen more sustainable habits within academia. In this paper, we propose a secure LoRa-based tracking system for the BIRA bicycle. The BIRA bicycle is an initiative of Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo (IPVC) that aims to promote bicycle usage on campus, by encouraging the adoption of more sustainable mobility habits within the institution. The proposed system consists of BIRA bicycles equipped with low-cost GPS trackers. The collected data is then transmitted using a LoRaWAN infrastructure to an application server, which is responsible for storing and serving the client application with several contextual information, such as location, route, speed, and battery level. The results have shown that the proposed system is a viable low-cost solution for tracking bicycles and users' habits at a campus or even a city level.