Smart Jacket for Hiker (SACKER) prototype design by ITS students

ITS Campus, ITS News – Over the past four years, the number of accidents and deaths on hiking trails has increased. It is not uncommon for rescue teams to have difficulty finding the location points of the climbing victims. To overcome this problem, five Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) students initiated the SACKER, Smart Jacket for Hiker.

Talia Kamil (Mechanical Engineering), Cindi Dwi Pramudita (Informatics Engineering), Rafif Fernanda (Electrical Engineering), Jauhari Azhar (Materials and Metallurgical Engineering), and Raditya Rafie Johari (Business Management) initiated the innovation.

Talia Kamil, the team leader, revealed that the SACKER is a jacket equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) component and a pulse sensor that functions to detect the location and condition of the climbers. “We chose the two components to minimize search time in case of missing climbers,” she explained.

ITS SACKER Team member who initiated jacket innovation for climber safety

Talia added that the GPS component on the SACKER works is as a sender of location signals from climbers. At the same time, the pulse sensor component itself is a heart rate sensor connected to an indicator light to determine the condition of the climber’s heart rate. “The light will turn on if the climber’s heart rate is above 90bpm,” she added.

In addition to knowing each other’s condition, continued Talia, the lamp is also helpful to facilitate the search for climbing victims when lost or lost at night. “Later on, data on the location and condition of climbers will be sent with the HC-12 serial communication module, which will be displayed on the monitor at the registration post,” she explained.

According to Talia, previously, there have been similar ideas related to this research, including life vests and location tracking gloves. “The difference is, our innovation is equipped with GPS and pulse sensors which are then packaged in the form of a jacket,” said the student who was born in Trenggalek, May 9, 2001.

ITS SACKER Team presentation session at the International Invention Competition for Young Muslim Scientists (IICYMS) 2021 virtually

Thanks to this brilliant idea, their team won a silver medal in the International Invention Competition for Young Muslim Scientists (IICYMS) 2021. Carrying the title SACKER (Smart Jacket for Hiker): GPS and Pulse Sensor-Based Smart Jacket to Monitoring Track and Condition of Hiker, they managed to complete two months of research thanks to the guidance of an ITS Mechanical Engineering lecturer, Ari Kurniawan Saputra ST MT.

The ITS SACKER team, during a virtual discussion with the supervisor, Ari Kurniawan Saputra ST MT

The judges, said Talia, gave many positive comments and offered assistance for realizing the tool in the future. “According to them, our innovation is quite interesting and can be realized even though it requires additional costs to expand the range of the transceiver module on the device,” explained the 2019 student.

Talia and the team feel that they are still unable to carry out the preparation of the prototype and its testing, considering that their current research is only in the form of paper. In the future, she hopes that this pandemic can pass soon so that this idea can be more easily developed. “In addition, we also hope that SACKER can be realized and accepted by many people,” she concluded. (far/ITS Public Relation)

Reporter: Erchi Ad’ha Loyensya