Project summary

When earthquakes, severe storms, or grid blackouts knock out power and cell towers, rural health clinics get cut off from regional hospitals almost instantly. Nurses and field medics are left with pregnant mothers or trauma patients in critical condition and no way to ask an off-site doctor for advice or flag urgent surgical transfers. Satellite terminals are too bulky and expensive for small outposts, while commercial telemedicine setups assume working 4G or fiber networks that simply do not exist in these scenarios. PulseLoRa solves this with a cheap, battery-operated vital-sign transmitter that talks directly to district hospitals over unlicensed radio frequencies (sub-GHz LoRa). Instead of streaming heavy raw wave data that would clog narrow radio bands, our edge controller analyzes the vital signals locally, converts key baseline shifts into tiny 16-to-32-byte status summaries, and transmits them across 10 to 15 kilometers without touching the internet or any cellular infrastructure.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

We want to deliver a field-ready, fully open hardware-software telemetry unit that local health posts can build and run for less than $40 in off-the-shelf components.

Over the next 6 months, my lab will take this through three hands-on engineering phases:

• Custom data packing: We will strip away heavy waveform transfers. The local microcontroller (ESP32-S3) will process raw photoplethysmography and temperature readings, extract heart-rate variability and oxygen saturation anomalies, and pack those diagnostic flags into dense, byte-level telemetry packets.

• Low-power link tuning: We are implementing an asynchronous, receiver-initiated duty-cycling protocol on Semtech SX1262 LoRa modules. The goal is keeping quiescent power draw minimal so a node can run continuously for 30 to 45 days on a standard 18650 cell backed by a palm-sized 2W solar panel.

• Open release: Everything, KiCad board layouts, Bill of Materials, C++ embedded firmware, and an offline triage monitoring dashboard, will be published publicly on GitHub under an MIT license, accompanied by bench tests measuring packet loss through simulated terrain obstacles.

How will this funding be used?

• Hardware dev boards and components ($20,500): Semtech SX1262 transceivers, medical-grade pulse oximeter sensor boards, low-noise amplifiers, directional antennas, rechargeable battery packs, and weather-sealed field housings.

• Student stipend ($36,500): 12 months of direct compensation for a graduate research assistant in my department at METU-NCC to handle firmware debugging, board bring-up, and outdoor packet-drop testing.

• RF field verification ($5,500): Field testing across varied elevation and foliage profiles to document real-world link margins, packet drop rates, and power-consumption metrics under heavy interference.

• Assembly manuals and bench documentation ($5,500): Step-by-step soldering and deployment guides written specifically for field technicians and humanitarian groups.

• Total: $68,000.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

• Dr. Muhammad Toaha Raza Khan (Project Lead): I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU-NCC). My Ph.D. and postdoc work centered on low-power wireless protocols, edge computing, and ad-hoc networks. I published work on ultra-low-bitrate semantic compression in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters in 2026, along with reviews on binary-sensor health tracking in Information Fusion. I hold patents on energy-efficient duty-cycle scheduling for constrained networks.

• Graduate Research Assistants: Two engineering students from our department lab with direct bench experience in C/C++ embedded programming, SPI/I2C sensor integration, and LoRa packet analysis.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

• Terrain shadow and RF obstruction: If clinics sit deep in steep valleys or behind dense forest canopies, direct sub-GHz line-of-sight may fail. We address this by programming simple store-and-forward relay capability into the firmware, allowing an intermediate battery-backed node on a ridge line to repeat packets.

• Clinical usability issues: If nurses have to fiddle with complex setup menus, they will abandon the device during emergencies. We are eliminating screens on the patient node entirely; it turns on with a single toggle switch, auto-probes the sensor, and communicates operational state via simple status beeps and LED indicators.

• If it fails to hit range targets: Even if dense topological obstructions cap point-to-point range at 4 km instead of 12 km, the open-source firmware and compact data-compression pipeline remain useful as a local triage logger for field triage stations and neighborhood emergency camps.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

• £80,000 through the UK International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) for project 935, which explores post-earthquake communication resilience using LoRa and UAV systems.

• 120,000 TL (~$3,500 USD) across two AdımODTÜ undergraduate research grants (ADIMODTÜ-2026/8 and 2026/9) for embedded system design.