Lumkani

  • Project Leader

    Paul Mesarcik

  • Organisation

    Lumkani

  • Designed By

    Samuel Ginsberg, Francois Petousis and Max Basler

  • Project Location

    Cape Town (South Africa)

  • Project website

    www.lumkani.com

Lumkani has created the world’s first networked heat-detector designed specifically for informal settlements. Lumkani’s heat detector addresses the devastation caused by the spread of fires in urban slums, by creating a community wide early warning.

The device detects fires by sensing for a rate of rise of temperature, rather than smoke, which would cause many false alarms. In the event of a fire, the detectors communicate to one another by means of radio frequency (RF) to create a community wide alert – the alert is transmitted to neighbouring detectors within a 60m radius of the fire, giving the community at large the necessary advanced warning to deal with the fire before it becomes unmanageable.

Lumkani have also developed and deployed an Internet gateway that monitors the health of the detector network, calculates the GPS co-ordinates of a fire, and can send this information to emergency services or people in the affected community.

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Lumkani
Lumkani
Lumkani