SafeAngel Enables Monitoring of 'At Risk' Individuals

MILTON KEYNES, ENGLAND - SafeAngel, a world global positioning system (GPS) tracking platform from eLocus Systems, with telephony from NewVoiceMedia (NVM) and Aculab, is now available. SafeAngel can be used to monitor 'at risk' individuals who need to be located immediately or should be within a specific region for their safety. Previously, tracking systems made the user go to a Web site to view the location of an identified person. Now, parents can contact the SafeAngel system using a telephone and the child's street address location will be spoken back to them. SafeAngel operates using a Bluetooth radio link between a tiny GPS tracker and the child's mobile phone, using eLocus software that is downloaded in order to automatically send regular positional updates. Parents access information via NVM's VoiceXML interface, which is powered by Aculab's Prosody PCI DSP resource card. Prosody provides the digital network access and speech processing capabilities in order that parents can phone into the system. When calling in, Prosody's record and playback functionality prompts the parent to enter the ID of the device. Once verified, the parent is offered a number of options. Parameters - like boundaries - can be set where they can specify a distance of 1 to 500 metres around the given location. If a child leaves the recognised area, the parent will be notified via a phone call to their designated telephone number. The coordinates of the selected boundaries are downloaded to the SafeAngel servers where the parameters are stored. These servers process the tracking of the child. Every 10 seconds, the location data is automatically transmitted to the SafeAngel server via IP-based GPRS from the child's mobile phone. The SafeAngel application monitors the location of the child, in relation to its boundaries and other status information. When a call comes in from the parent, NVM's VoiceXML interpreter obtains location information, using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard, from the SafeAngel server. This location information is then spoken back to the parent using Aculab TTS. Richard Pickering, managing director at NVM said, "We are delighted that eLocus chose NewVoiceMedia's VoiceXML interpreter to provide the telephony interface to their location based services. Aculab's telco quality technology has enabled us to build a scalable and resilient VoiceXML platform, upon which eLocus were able to develop and launch their service. This was all achieved within a very short period and with minimum development cost."