OTIoT — A browser-based object tracking solution for the Internet of Things

Today more and more users are interested in tracking their personal belongings (e.g., bikes or drawings), but do not want to buy special and costly hardware, pay for user-unfriendly services, and establish contracts with service providers. Further, commercial solutions only support limited opportunities for individual settings (e.g., when to send position information or alarm). Thus, the proposed solution “Object Tracking solution for the Internet of Things” (OTIoT) offers a user-friendly, browser-based front-end to save mobile device resources, scales to different screen sizes, and allows for individual settings to track tagged objects in real-time. These tags use GPS information to locate devices and use the new communication technology LoRaWAN to transmit data via “The Things Network” to the back-end, which allows for further processing of location information (e.g., storage, access via OTIoT). Functional front-end evaluations show that the prototype fulfills major user requests and extends existing approaches.