Design of GPS System for Tracking a Life Vest

Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite navigation system used to determine the ground position of an object. Nowadays, the GPS equips in many commercial products such as smartphones, sport watches, car dash camera and hiking. It apparently has unforeseen benefits to society that go well
beyond military and civil aviation applications. In time of emergency crisis (for instance, aircraft crash at sea or ship sinking), survivors need to be found and rescued in a short time. Therefore, this paper proposed a life vest with GPS tracking capabilities. The system consists of Radio Frequency (RF)
transceiver, life vest, GPS Module and GPS cockpit tracking program. The GPS module attached to the life jacket. The design of GPS tracking life jacket comprises two segments, one is GPS life jacket tracking system and another one is receiver system. The GPS module works with the RF transmitter to convey series NMEA 0183 format messages to receiver system. These messages possess longitude, latitude, time, date and other satellite information. Based on the GPS data received, the cockpit GPS tracing program would extract the latitude and longitude. Then, the coordinate position of the survivor pinpoints on the Google Map. The proposed system has been tested in a field and displayed good performance compared to a standard GPS device.