Development of an asset tracking and monitoring scheme for a household item-sharing service

Nowadays there are many asset sharing services provided by various companies worldwide. In the USA, 56.5 million people have used a sharing economy service at least once in 2017, and in China 600 million people were involved in the sharing economy in 2016. However, most of these services face the same problem, which is asset damage. They do not have ways to practically monitor their assets' conditions. This paper describes the development of a system for the real-time monitoring of the shared assets. The system has built-in functions that allow the administrator to track the assets' locations and motions in real-time, and it could initiate alerts when the asset has entered higher-risk areas or is undergoing abnormal motions. A GPRS module was used to send the sensed information to a remote server wirelessly. The system was tested by taking it to a predefined high-risk zone for 19% of the time, and by putting it in high-risk motion for 80% of the time. The system detected all the abnormal statuses successfully.