A personal locator for your kids

Sufia Tippu
Saturday, 02 December 2006 07:19

Business IT - Technology

Parents can locate their kids in a real time manner – anytime anyplace via their mobile phones.

Called iKids (intelligent kids), this personal locator is a mobile-sized instrument that can be pre-programmed and has only six keys. The keys contain digits from one to five and the sixth key is an emergency number.

Parents can mark the zone in the map and program the device. When kids move out of the area, parents receive an alert.

It was developed especially for parents with pre-teen children (6-11 years) as a personal safety and location device.

By addressing the potential need of parent customers, the operator can induce them to subscribe to the unique iKids services.
 
“You can also a create safety zone, say the school or the daycare zone, This way as long as the kid is in this area, you can be sure he is safe but once he moves out, the parent would be an alert,” says Ashutosh Pande, MD, SiRF Technology India.

The parent company, US-based SiRF Technology, Inc. creates technologies that offer “location awareness” or “location intelligence” to a wide range of consumer products. SiRF’s location-awareness solutions are based on the global positioning system (GPS), the same technology used to guide everything from the space shuttle to car navigation systems to handheld devices used by backpackers.

Currently, the instrument is being successfully used in the Netherlands, Korea and Australia and is expected to be launched in India soon.

“Apart from being able to offer a real time monitoring solution to parent consumers, this gadget could also be used as a personal locator for call center employees and those who work in remote areas” says Pande.

Logistics personnel in a call center can get repeated alert every 10 minutes on their system or mobile and would immediately come to know if their employees are going out of the normal pick-up route.