Smart Bag: Monitoring Food Transportation in Developing Countries

There are a variety of models, processes and technologies developed for use in transportation of food. Most of these assume the availability of good infrastructure, well established workflows, optimized or at least professional packaging, and trained workers. However, these are sometime not wanted or even possible. An example is the milk and meat production in Cameroon. A field study shows that these are mostly cottage industries and the logistics of transportation employed are very ad hoc in nature. Therefore, there is no central control of the transport and as a result, the farmer is unaware of the state of the goods when they arrive at the destination. Taking these specific issues into consideration, we have developed a monitoring solution to use in transportation to determine the state of the goods after the transport is completed. This solution, called the Smart Bag, is an Internet of Things (IoT) based simple, reliable and cost-effective device to be used in transporting milk and meat. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of the Smart Bag which we plan to deploy in Cameroon.