Child Loss Prevention: A WiFi based assistant in a predetermined domain

This project tries to plan and implement a solution to assist parents in keeping their child close and locating them once lost, in a public venue setting such as a museum. The creative technology design process was used as a methodical guiding principle; this includes reviewing related work, user interviews, ideation, specification, and evaluation phases. Non-functional requirements of the system include reliability, reusability, transparency. Functional requirements include an Early Alarm, Local Ranging/Positioning, and Information Privacy/Security. To answer the research questions a system was developed. The system consists of 3 main components, the Child Node, the Sentinel and the Smartphone Application. The Child Node is responsible for emitting a wireless beacon from the Child‟s position. The Sentinel is a monitoring sensor which can be placed by business owners over various parts of the venue. The Smartphone Application serves as interaction with the parents. Positioning/Ranging using the Sentinels was not fully possible due to sampling performance limitations explained in the realization and evaluation phase. The Early Alarm showed potential by alerting on time, however it requires further testing and evaluation to be fine-tuned for reliability.