Real-time protection of kids remotely, leveraging Disruptive Mobile Technologies

Kids are invaluable assets to parents, society and the future of a country. Nowadays, it has become extremely essential to protect children from socio-evil activities that are on the alarming rise. Consequently, there is an increased responsibility for parents & schools to closely monitor kid’s activities during schools and play hours. That being said it becomes difficult and unfeasible for parents, guardians & schools to keep watch on kids physically 24*7.

This hurdle of continuous observation of kids and alerting the caretakers in the most needed time can be well addressed by disruptive smart technologies that can termed as SMAC+, standing for Social, Media, Analytics, Cloud, M2M, IoT, UC, and so on. SMAC+ disruptive technologies are exponentially evolving and are becoming key instruments in solving the most critical problems in business and society. With mobile adoption growing manifold, other dimensions like Social, Analytics, Cloud, Unified Communications, Internet of Thingsare enabling mobile as a next generation instrument which is going to be used in almost every use case of human life. SMAC+ adoption is bound to get easier in execution.

To address, 24*7 kids observation, we are envisioning a system that is a combination of following subsystems.

• Children
• Parents, guardians, schools and any other care-taking entities
• Geo-fencing platform
• Cloud-based dashboard for monitoring
• Mobile application for tracking and alerting the caretakers
• GPS Tracker (for school buses or any designated children carriage)
• Cheap GPS Tracker devices
• Mobile devices & wearable (ex: Gear-watch, Google Glass etc.) devices

How the SMAC+ System works?

All care-taking entities in the system like parents, guardians, teachers, drivers, etc. will have a mobile application installed on their mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and wearable devices like Smart Watch, Google Glass or any other device that is capable to receive alerts & notifications and basic user interface.

Children will be enabled with devices like Gear-Watch, where they can have interaction-mode enabled. Or, even cheap devices like GPS tracker that is hooked to either their uniforms, badges or school bags.

While admins can configure the generic rule setting on parameters like Geo-graphical navigation, time, event, class or playtime, caretakers can configure the personalized alerts & emergency alarms based on time, place, tracking etc.

The system works on the principle of both scheduled & unscheduled events. In case of schedule events, concerned people will get alerts & notifications, while relevant users can interact via mobile application accordingly. Some of general scheduled events could be school pickup/drop, tracking school bus movement, class timings and play timings. Unscheduled events could be of informative nature and/or any unwanted events like a child going out of school premise in class timings or a child’s absence in school bus for instance.

Key Features:

• Tracking

Tracker device or Gear Watch tied to a child’s wrist or stuck to his uniform will periodically upload the geo-coordinates to the Geo-fencing platform. This information will assist in rising potential use cases like;

• Enabling parents to track their children in real-time
• Facilitating teachers to track a child missing in the classroom
• Assisting school bus drivers to track a missing child in the bus

This feature will work with varied degree of accessibility to different users of this system. And this degree of varied accessibility of tracking is devised to safeguard the interest, privacy and safety of a child.  Ideally access control works with different users as follows;

• Parents and/or guardians will be able track their child’s move 24*7
• A teacher can track a student’s movement only during his class time
• A School bus driver can track a kid’s movement only during pickup & drop
• A School admin can only track a school kid from the time he/she leaves to school and until he/she reaches back to home

• Alerts & Notification

Alerts and notifications become quite useful in various use cases of the proposed system. Some of the potential use cases of this feature are;

• Alert message before pickup and drop, and also during delay due to traffic, if any
• Alert message incase of the student’s absence in class
• Notifying teacher about a kid’s leave
• Notifying school holidays and any other school functions
• Notifying the parents about the new bus driver/attendant with profile

• Communication between School & Parents

School admin can push any messages related to child’s academic matters like report cards, exam results, attendance status etc. And parents using this application can view this information in their application.

• Panic Alarm

Panic alarm is a very important feature of this system; this function will be triggered to the targeted users of the application when a scheduled or unscheduled event/rule is violated. And this alarm will continuously be triggered until the targeted recipient attends & realizes the violation. This feature will help safeguarding the kids from questionable conditions like absconding of a child from school’s premise, unsolicited man-handling of kids etc. Potential use cases where the Panic alarm will play an invaluable role are;

• School bus left the school but a kid didn’t board the bus
• School time is over but kid did not reach home
• Person other than parent/guardian came to receive the kid from school bus
• A child missed a class and traced in a different part of school premise for an unreasonable amount of time
• A child during school hours traced outside the school premise for an unreasonable amount of time

• Rescue lead

Rescue lead is a unique feature that is helpful when a kid is enabled with a wearable device like Gear watch or Google glass etc. If the system finds sufficient satisfying conditions to raise the panic alarm then it immediately pushes a message to the kid’s wearable device that will get the device to begin functioning like a spy camera. The device will start capturing the scene images in stealth mode at regular intervals of time by enabling the audio/video mode based on various governing factors like network bandwidth, remaining battery and light conditions. This operation continues until the parent/guardian knows the kids’ whereabouts and confirms the safety of child.

In case of extended delays in tracking the kid or unfortunate attempts of rescue, the uploaded information will play a crucial role for respective law enforcement authorities.