| ABSTRACT |
Smart childcare solutions driven by innovative sensing and communication technology have emerged as a necessary response to the growing global emphasis on infant safety and comfort. Conventional baby strollers critically lack intelligent monitoring, automated safety layers, and real-time feedback capabilities, rendering them entirely reliant on uninterrupted parental supervision. This paper presents the comprehensive engineering design, software architecture, and hardware evaluation of IntelliTots: Smart Baby Stroller for Safety, Comfort, and Monitoring, an advanced Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem designed to optimize both parental convenience and child well-being. Operating on a high-performance Raspberry Pi 5 edge controller, the prototype integrates diverse environmental and physical sensors, including a DHT22 module for thermal tracking, digital USB microphones for acoustic cry detection, ultrasonic arrays for obstacle avoidance, and GPS sensors for continuous geospatial localization. Automated comfort and safety actuations are administered through a closed-loop mechanical system featuring a DC cooling fan, LED night lights, and an automated servo-driven rocking module coordinated via a PCA9685 PWM driver. The software ecosystem utilizes a multi-platform mobile application developed with the Flutter framework and tethered to a Firebase Cloud Firestore backend for secure, ultra-low latency data synchronization. Empirical evaluations confirm the robustness of the system's novel cry-detection peak thresholds, the successful implementation of a split-power architecture to prevent voltage instability, and highly responsive automated actuation. IntelliTots effectively establishes a scalable, user-friendly childcare framework that significantly mitigates caregiver workload while proactively preserving infant safety in dynamic outdoor environments.
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