Emergencies require more than a way to raise an alert. They require a reliable path from the moment an emergency is triggered to the people responsible for responding. NETRI was built around this idea: connecting a dedicated emergency trigger with an organization's incident management and response workflow.
NETRI is an end-to-end emergency communication prototype consisting of six stages: virtual ESP32 hardware, a browser-based device simulator, a simulated Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) gateway, a backend incident engine, an organization dashboard, and an emergency responder console.
When the user holds the simulator's SOS control for two seconds, the device generates an emergency event. The gateway relays the event to the backend, which validates it, creates an incident, handles deduplication and responder assignment, and broadcasts updates to both consoles in real time.
Responders can acknowledge and resolve incidents, while organization operators can cancel open incidents. The entire prototype is accessible through a unified web portal.
We used React and TypeScript with Vite for the frontend applications, Node.js and Express for the backend and gateway, Socket.IO for real-time updates, SQLite for persistence, and Zod for shared event validation. The virtual hardware stage uses ESP32 firmware and Wokwi.
We separated the device, communication, incident processing, and response layers so each component could be developed and tested independently. We then integrated the simulator, gateway, backend, and dashboards into a working end-to-end workflow and deployed the application on Render.
One of the main challenges was integrating multiple independent components while keeping their data contracts and incident states consistent. Debugging the communication path, handling unavailable services, preventing duplicate incidents, and ensuring real-time updates required careful testing across the entire system.
Building NETRI taught us the importance of modular architecture, shared contracts, clear state transitions, and end-to-end verification. It also helped us distinguish a working prototype from a production-ready emergency system.
NETRI's Round 1 prototype establishes the software and communication workflow. Future development can focus on integrating physical BLE communication, strengthening security and reliability, and preparing the system for controlled real-world evaluation.
Built With
- ble
- c++
- esp32
- express.js
- javascript
- node.js
- platformio
- react
- render
- restapi
- socket.io
- sqlite
- typescript
- vite
- wokwi
- zod
