Can we reveal the final destination of humanitarian aid?
A blog by Alasdair Davies, a Frontier Tech implementing Partner
This post captures learning from our pilot — ‘Smart geo-seals to track delivery of humanitarian aid’
Tracking your home Amazon order or online shopping from warehouse to door is now commonplace, with apps and online tracking portals built to specifically help consumers answer that age-old question — ” where’s my order?”.
However, the infrastructure built by modern courier and delivery services to enable the live tracking of your purchase from warehouse to door is sophisticated and complex. Investment in technology has enabled the tracking of packages throughout the delivery chain, utilising embedded devices and wireless connectivity, such as GPS tracked delivery trucks, handheld cellular-based barcode scanners and SMS communications to update warehouse inventories and to keep you informed in real time. It’s a service many city dwellers have become accustomed to, but can we achieve the same if we want to track large quantities of humanitarian aid and reveal the final destination, globally and at low cost?
Can we achieve the same if we want to track large quantities of humanitarian aid and reveal the final destination, globally, and at low cost?
It’s a question that was posed by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Frontier Technologies Hub, who wanted to know if it was possible to reveal the true destination of humanitarian aid to help monitor delivery efficiency and to understand if aid was reaching the right people. Could we track and confirm the exact location that a parcel was opened, globally, where there may not be any existing communications infrastructure? As specialists in telemetry solutions, Arribada was asked to rise to the challenge. The project’s working title is “GeoSeals” — the new low cost tagging solution that can be utilised to seal and detect the opening of a package or aid item.
Our background is tracking wildlife and environmental assets, having previously tracked plastic water bottles across oceans to reveal the final destination of marine litter and sea turtles to understand where marine protected areas should be established. For this project, we plan to repurpose our existing tracking technologies, or may even develop a completely new solution to achieve the goal. To better understand needs, we first went back to the drawing board and worked with the FCDO’s logistical teams to sketch out the current supply chains to understand the types of aid shipped, current tracking limitations, and importantly, the value that tracking specific aid items could deliver for logistical operatives and aid delivery teams globally.
UK humanitarian aid in the form of FCDO hygiene kits being prepared on a pallet for delivery
We’ll spend 15 months in total working on the problem, co-designing the solution with the FCDO and Frontier Technologies Hub to research and implement a prototype that will be used in a real aid shipment in 2023.
From a technology standpoint, there are plenty of options available for us to explore, ranging from low-cost embedded Bluetooth devices to batteryless Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) scanning. We essentially want to focus on an automated solution, removing the need for any physical scanning (barcodes etc), hence before we jumped to a specific hardware specification we first worked to unravel the problem we were trying to solve by talking with humanitarian and aid logistical teams, mapping the processes that drive and power the UK’s humanitarian aid to make sure we provide the value they need and we fully understand the logistical process.
During our initial meetings we discovered a number of interesting challenges that needed to be thought about if we were to be successful. We discovered that packages boxed and shipped from the UK may be re-boxed at a receiving warehouse in certain circumstances, so we’d need to think about the provision of packaging materials at distribution points as well as at origin if our special packaging itself is required.
Plastic wrapping and packaging material is currently used to wrap and secure parcels on pallets. We’re thinking about how we can minimise the use of plastics within the design of GeoSeals technology.
Now that we have also seen first hand how plastic packaging is used within the current aid supply chain, we are in a position to start to think about the materials a “GeoSeal” will need to be manufactured from to reduce our use of plastic and to ensure that GeoSeals can easily be recycled.
Meetings held at an FCDO aid warehouse helped us to question how a GeoSeal may be recycled / reclaimed / recovered. We have enough background information now, including photographs of current packaging / parcels / materials to be able to flesh out what a GeoSeal may be constructed from, and in future sprints we plan to recommend listing and identifying actual plastics, metals, materials and electronics that we think will be required to manufacture and produce GeoSeals.
Specifically, we would focus on the type of plastic (thermoplastic etc), recyclability and other aspects that may dictate how we integrate GeoSeals into the supply chain, how they are designed, made and what options we have to adhere to best practice principles. Cost will also be a critical factor. We are dealing with many thousands of packages, palletized (shipped together on a pallet) to multiple destinations globally, ranging from hygiene kits to satellite phones, so the tagging solution we develop will need to be very low cost (<£1) to enable multiple boxes and aid packages to be shipped and tracked.
This challenge has thrown up a few ideas that stem around the use of active RFID, a technology used to tag valuable items in shops due to the low cost of the tagging process. We’re now exploring how we may be able to create a hybrid RFID system to lower costs, connected to a hub or device that is capable of relaying data globally to reveal the historical position of the tracked packages.
In our next update we’ll share more of our research and development work as we start to develop this exciting GeoSeals technology and sketch out our prototype designs.
If you’d like to dig in further…
📚 Explore learnings from the pilot’s second sprint — ‘Can you cost effectively track soap?’
⛴️ Dive into the pilot’s profile — Smart Geo-Seals to Track Delivery of Humanitarian Aid
