A Personal Use Vehicle Anti-Theft Tracking System Using IoT Platform

Recently, the vehicle theft has become the serious issue in developing countries including Myanmar, due to the rapid increase of vehicles. Then, a Vehicle Anti-theft Tracking (VAT) system can play an important role to protect it. Unfortunately, a conventional VAT system is too expensive to be introduced for many people in such countries. On the one hand, the Internet of Things (IoT) has come out as a popular technology changing the concept of “connecting people” to “connecting things”, where low-cost IoT devices and cloud platforms have become available. In this paper, we propose a personal use VAT system using IoT platform that can be easily introduced due to the very low cost. This system has the following features: (1) the vehicle theft is detected using an Arduino-connected GPS module, (2) the alarm message is sent to the mobile phone of the vehicle owner as an SMS message on GSM, (3) the conditions of GPS/GSM modules are always monitored where the alarm is sent to the owner if they are not live, and (4) the location data of the vehicle is periodically stored in the IoT cloud platform called ThingSpeak. We implement this system and confirm the correctness of the implemented functions through trial applications.