There has been an exponential growth in the penetration of embedded systems in almost all domains ranging from automobiles to home appliances to ICT. In the recent times, there has been lot of emphasis towards using embedded systems and embedded computing processors even in desktop kind of application environment. This trend is due to the intrinsic benefits offered by the embedded systems over traditional desktop systems and also due to rampant increase in the computational power of embedded processors. Rural application platforms are meant to be used for executing applications required for providing different e-services, self-help services relevant in the rustic areas. The eco system prevailing in rural areas, especially in the developing countries are largely challenging in terms of power outages, erratic grid power conditions, high temperature ranges, varying humidity, dusty environment etc. Although embedded systems offer many advantages, the embedded systems have some serious limitations as well, particularly in the contexts of application platform. In this paper, we discuss and analyze different aspects and challenges towards design of embedded systems for rural application platform. Also we discuss on approaches towards mitigating those challenges pertinent to design of an embedded system suited for rural application platform.

Embedded system Embedded software System Design Application platform