Scenario 1: Your 5 year old child is allowed to ride his bicycle around the
block, but not to go any further. In this case the "secure zone" would be
defined as a radius around your house.
Safe & Sound is an application which addresses children and security. It
enables a parent to define a "secure zone" for their child.
A secure zone is an area in which the parent
considers the child to be safe. If the child ventures out of this zone, the
parent will be alerted. He can then decide to place a call to the kid, or
log the kid's coordinates (latitude, longitude, direction heading, and
speed). The child will also receive an audio alert indicating that he is out
of the defined boundary.
Scenario 1: Your 5 year old child is allowed to ride his bicycle around the
block, but not to go any further. In this case the "secure zone" would be
defined as a radius around your house.
Scenario 2: A parent takes her kid to an amusement park, but wants the child
to remain within a certain proximity. In this case the "secure zone" would
be defined not as a radius from a fixed point, but rather as a radius around
the parent.
The location of the phone is known by the service provider. This information
is not currently available to the user/developer but might be in the future.
There are no privacy issues involved in giving the phone *itself* the
geographic coordinates of its own whereabouts (as opposed to giving this
information data to a third party).
Phones with embedded GPS chips are now available, so the location data
is received from the internal GPS receiver. Alternatively, a receiver can be
be connected to the serial port of the phone.
The current prototype has been implemented on Motorola's iDen i88s phones.