subject: BE Projects - Project Idea - Track Down my Child [print this page] BE Projects - Project Idea - Track Down my Child
One of the biggest concerns for parents is the safety of their children when they are not around. Typically children spend a lot of time in schools, camps and shopping alone and away from family and face a significant risk of getting lost without actively being monitored. This idea is a framework for any solution which can help parents monitor their children using a Location Based Service approach. We all are aware of the whole frenzy of check-ins and badges around location services like foursquare and others. Most of them are services primarily being used for entertainment .. its now time for a more serious use case to be addressed. This idea is around the thought of building a ultra low cost device which can use GPS, Cell Phone ID lookup or any other mechanism to be able to periodically send coordinates of a device to a central server . This device should send latitude/longitude which can be used to lookup against a central/local database to map this to a physical address. The App on the parent's phone can then be notified either by SMS when the location of the child is outside the perimeter of a specific set of locations. This would be a highly useful solution for really small children 3-5 years of age who can be effectively monitored using the device. The solution should be continuously operating on the device without the need to have any manual intervention. This device need not be a phone could be a stripped down version of a phone and with/without GPS. The less needed the better since this idea really needs very little to function and should be focused on this specific use case and needs to be low cost to be able to function effectively. Start with the following services, and could start with some basic implementation of a location based service and evolving it into a minimal solution only using basic infrastructure needed to communicate the location. Google Latitude provides APIs for location based services More details on the idea at the link below:
