Nov/Dec 2005

A lone worker personal safety alarm using a neat and compact Bluetooth "keyfob" activator has been developed by Mobile Data Gateway, a long-established mobile applications specialist which uses Grapevine branding and has a Web address of www.20-20visibility.com.

At its core, the system uses the fob in conjunction with a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. If the worker confronts an emergency, he or she simply presses a button on the fob. This communicates with the mobile phone, which in turn automatically sends a message to the company's Web server. The employer is then notified of the alarm and told the location of the staff member.

The clever part is the way the system works out the staff member's location. By default, it uses automatic SIM card tracking - the classic GSM phone tracking approach. However, the company acknowledges that this doesn't always produce a highly accurate position plot, so it has evolved various ruses to improve accuracy.

One is to integrate the system with a simple job management application. Every day the employer sends a list jobs to the worker's phone by WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), and the worker simply scrolls through this list at the end of each job and sends a "task completed" message. This shows where he or she is at that moment, and can be cross-referenced with a SIM plot in an emergency.

 

The other trick the company has up its sleeve is to link the system with PDA-based mobile navigation systems such as Co-pilot, Garmin or TomTom. In this case the system captures the exact GPS-based coordinates.

The fob device itself costs £24.99, while the monthly charge for the service starts at £4.99 (including the job management system).

The product is one of a range of mobile data applications from Mobile Data Gateway, whose systems are device- and platform agnostic, supporting most mobile devices and operating systems.