Personal microdevices for wide-area location via mobile gateways

Diverse social applications rely on remote location of personal devices: house arrest tracker systems, remote monitoring of alcoholic persons, child locator devices and remote protection of victims of domestic abuse are some examples. However, existing personal location devices either depend on a fixed station (a domestic gateway) -thus limiting user mobility-, or include a full cell phone -thus increasing weight, cost and power consumption-. In this demonstration, we present a new system we have developed for the Galician regional government (Spain) to track domestic abusers and their victims. It consists of two units, namely a personal low-cost light microdevice (bracelet in the sequel) and a commercial cell phone. The latter acts as a mobile gateway, which the bracelet accesses via a PAN. By doing so, we benefit from the advantages of the two previous approaches: the small size of bracelets for fixed gateways and the full mobility of those including a full cell phone. Wide-area location capability may reside either in the bracelet (as a GPS modem) or in the mobile gateway (either as a GPS modem or via core network-assisted location). If the bracelet leaves mobile gateway PAN range, the latter alerts the user and/or sends an alarm to a remote monitoring station.