Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 2017, 10, 907-924

http://www.scirp.org/journal/jsea
ISSN Online: 1945-3124
ISSN Print: 1945-3116

Kids’ Tracker: An Android Application for

Tracking Children

Saadeh Z. Sweidan, Ramzi Saifan, Khalid A. Darabkh, Shaima Abu-Kaff, Sima Al-Ali

Department of Computer Engineering, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

How to cite this paper: Sweidan, S.Z., Abstract

Saifan, R., Darabkh, K.A., Abu-Kaff, S. and
Al-Ali, S. (2017) Kids’ Tracker: An Android Smart phones with unlimited applications are considered essential for modern
Application for Tracking Children. Journal day lifestyle, hence the number of cell phone users has sky rocketed in this
of Software Engineering and Applications,
decade. The high percentage of children and teenagers carrying cell phones
10, 907-924.
https://doi.org/10.4236/jsea.2017.1013052 has caused controversy on how justified having a minor carrying a communi-
cation device is. There is no doubt about the fact that parents have to be able
Received: November 18, 2017 to contact their children, however, a child with a phone and poor judgment
Accepted: December 25, 2017
Published: December 28, 2017
will most probably be vulnerable to the outer world with all its’ threats and
abuses. Furthermore, we have the serious health issues related to wireless de-
Copyright © 2017 by authors and vices effects on people, under those circumstances multiple solutions have
Scientific Research Publishing Inc.
been presented for a safe secure method for parents to track their children
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International without the need of cell phones. The proposed alternatives included phones
License (CC BY 4.0). with limited privileges for children; these phones are restricted to the ability of
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ calling specific people only and have already installed applications for tracking
Open Access location. Our proposed system “kids’ tracker” includes a wearable device for
the child and an Android application on the parents’ smart phone. Kids’
tracker has shown a very decent performance with many unique features
compared to other existing solutions.

Keywords
Android Apps, GPS, Smart Phones, Raspberry Pi, GPGGA

1. Introduction
Mobile phones have changed our lives drastically, making individuals reachable
constantly and giving new types of correspondence like informing and video
calls [1]-[11]. It is very grand how these phones have changed in the previous
couple of years, beginning off from being a science fiction dream to turning into
a basic piece of present day way of life claimed by the greater part of people

DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2017.1013052 Dec. 28, 2017 907 Journal of Software Engineering and Applications
S. Z. Sweidan et al.

worldwide [12]-[21]. A smart phone is a mobile phone with more advanced

computing capabilities and connectivity features [22]-[32]. IBM presented The
first smart phone 1992 [33]. It had a plethora of features including a calendar,
address book, calculator, email service, and even a touch screen. Early smart
phones typically combined the characteristics of a mobile phone with those of
other popular consumer device, such as a media player, a digital camera, and/or
a Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation unit. Nowadays, smart phones
expanded to include all of those services in addition to a touch screen, web
browsing, Wi-Fi, 3rd-party applications, and many others [34].
As a result of all the features included in them, smart phones can act as porta-
ble computers with their operating systems and have the ability to run most
computer programs efficiently. Moreover, the application stores that are pro-
vided by different smart phones manufacturers can be used to install thousands
of different useful applications which cover a very wide range of uses including
weather forecasting, chatting, latest news, editing photographs, online shopping
and others [35]. Based on that, it is not a surprise that the number of smart
phone users surpassed desktop users in 2014 [36].
Smart phones have become an essential part of human life including children
and teenagers. However, allowing a child to carry a smart phone with internet
access has created a controversy about how convenient or necessary it is com-
pared to the risks [37]. On one hand, having mobile phones allows children to be
connected and reachable at all the times by their parents who find that very use-
ful and of course necessary [38]. However, most experts warn about the dark
side of children’s use of mobile phones which may negatively affect their morals
and social values. For instance, these devices open them to an unsupervised vir-
tual world with media materials that might be age inappropriate. Also, children
using social networks might be misused by child abusers and criminals who can
be a genuine risk for kids [39]. In addition to that, mobile phones are related to
many health problems both mentally and physically which are even more dan-
gerous for younger users according to multiple researches [40]. Studies recom-
mend that mobile phones should not be given to children below sixteen years
old because their brains are not able to resist the effects of mobile radiation since
the tissues in the brain and body are still developing. These radiations can cause
damage due to absorption of radiation as shown in Figure 1 [41].

Figure 1. Demonstration of mobile phone radiation impact on

the brain for different ages [41] [42].

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 S. Z. Sweidan et al.

Nowadays, most parents use mobile phones to track their children by giving
them mobile phones and keep contacting them through phone calls. However,
from the aforementioned reasons, this approach comes with multiple negative
effects. Consequently, there is a need for an alternative approach which must be
safe and trusted.
The points mentioned above inspired us to present kids’ tracker that provides
a safe and efficient solution for parents who want to keep track of their children
location without giving them mobile phones. The proposed approach provides
the child with a wearable device which sends continuous signals to the parent’s
phone. These signals can be converted to detailed meaningful information about
the child’s location and his/her movements through a simple yet efficient appli-
cation.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the proposed
system and compares it to a number of similar systems. Section 3 introduces the
system’s design and interface besides describing main hardware components and
software tools. Sections 4 presents the implementation and testing process
through a number of output screen samples. Finally, Section 5 presents our con-
clusions.

2. Kid’s Tracker and Related Work

Our proposed work, kids’ tracker, presents a product that helps parents to keep
track of their children without the need to give them mobile phones. In this sce-
nario, the child wears a tracking device like a bracelet which is coupled with the
parents’ smart phone through an easy to use Android application. The parent
can sign in to his account which is given by the service provider to track his
children through different types of notifications. A periodic notification is sent
to the parent with the current location of the child. The parent can also access a
history record of the child’s movement that covers up to the last seven days.
The parent can create his/her own regions for locations where the child is ex-
pected to be in certain days and hours like home or school. If the child is in the
defined region at the expected day and time, the region name is colored in green
(green zone). However, if the child is in the defined region but out of the ex-
pected day and time, the region is colored in gray (gray zone). Finally, if the
child is in an undefined location, the red color is used for this location (red
zone). As soon as a child enters a red or a gray zone, an instant alert notification
is sent to the user so that a proper action is done. The GPS in the child’s weara-
ble device sends signals to a main server every 5 seconds, nonetheless periodic
notifications are sent every 60 minutes by default to the parent, who can change
the time between notifications as desired. Figure 2 shows the system response
for different cases to switch between zones and the corresponding notification to
each case.
A number of different existing solutions were presented to allow parents to
track their children. Life 360 Tracker [43] is a full software solution that makes it

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S. Z. Sweidan et al.

Figure 2. Switching between the three types of zones and the actions related to these changes.

easy to keep track of the location of participating family members as shown in

Figure 3. A circle of friends or family members is established so they can keep
track of each other’s current or past locations through application messages. Un-
like kids’ tracker, this app is more dedicated for adult users than tracking child-
ren due to the following:
1) Life 360 requires all users to have smart phones which brings us back to the
problem of a child having a cell phone.
2) Life 360 tracking process requires approval from both sides which is not
suitable for a parent/child scenario.
Alert notifications are not available due to lacking the ability of creating zones
or flags on dangerous locations.
On the other hand, TRAX is considered to be a GPS tracker for children and
pets [45]. In TRAX, a smart device works in conjunction with an application on
the smart phone allowing the user to locate children or pets anytime [45]. Figure
4 shows an example of a tracking process done by TRAX which is an efficient
and popular product with noticeable features that can be compared to kids’
tracker as follows:
1) Both TRAX and Kids’ tracker have a hardware device for the child and a
smart phone application for the parent to locate the child who should not use a
phone.
2) Both systems only send alert notifications when the child leaves or enters a
defined zone. However kids’ tracker has a remarkable additional feature which is

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 S. Z. Sweidan et al.

Figure 3. Life 360 map [44].

sending periodic notifications in different rates based on the parent needs.

3) While TRAX uses the official names of addresses such as street name and
building number, kids’ tracker allows the parent to give them personal mea-
ningful names like grandfather house or school.
4) TRAX has 24 hour history view whereas kids’ tracker has seven days.
5) TRAX can create safe zones compared to the more detailed three types of
zones system in kids’ tracker.

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S. Z. Sweidan et al.

Figure 4. TRAX map screen [46].

The Last few years have witnessed the appearance of multiple other applica-
tions and devices which can be used for tracking friends, pets, old people, and of
course children. Lassy project [47], for example, sends a picture of a lost child
along with a real time map which shows the coordinates of his/her last known
location. This allows every user of the application to look for him/her [48]. Al-
though it is free to download and has a noble aim, it can create a major threat by
allowing some people with sick interests to get information about lost children
which raises privacy and safety issues.
Another application is FBI Child ID [49] which was created by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. This application lets parents store their children’s pho-
tos plus other identification (height, weight, hair and eye color, age) for quick
access if a child ever goes missing. The information is stored on the Phone only
until parents need to send it to authorities. Notable features include safety tips,
checklists for what to do if something happens to your child, and shortcuts to
dial 911 or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Parents also
have the ability to email info immediately to law enforcement agencies if the

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 S. Z. Sweidan et al.

unthinkable occurs [50].

3. System Design and Interface

Figure 5 shows the proposed system design which consists of three parts: 1) a
server for the service provider where the database of users is stored, 2) a weara-
ble device for the child to be tracked, and 3) a smart phone on the parent side to
login to the application and track the child. The server interacts with the other
two parts as follows: it receives location information from the wearable device
and exchanges data from and to the parent’s smart phone as the figure shows.
The child’s device consists of a Raspberry Pi (RPI) with Global Positioning
System (GPS) unit and an antenna for sending continuous signals to the server.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized single board PC as appears in Figure 6.
The GPS is a space-based satellite route navigation system that gives area and
time data in all climate conditions, anywhere on or close to the earth where there
is an unhampered line to at least four GPS satellites [51]. Furthermore, different
software instruments and programming languages are utilised as a part of our
work, for instance Raspbian which is a free operating system based on De-
bian/Linux that is optimised for the Raspberry Pi hardware [52]. We likewise
used Python programming language which is a broadly used general-purpose
high-level programming language.

Figure 5. Kids’ tracker system design.

Figure 6. Raspberry pi board [53].

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S. Z. Sweidan et al.

On the other side, the main server holds a database with full detailed informa-
tion about parents and their children. The database is modified by periodic sig-
nals transmitted from the wearable devices to the server. Then accordingly, the
server sends different notifications to the smart phone on the parent side with
updated information about their children’s locations. Moreover, the parent can
update his/her settings and information in the database through the application
interfaces, and can check the history record for the child’s previous movements
and current location at any time without the need to wait for notifications.
The data that is read from GPS contains repeated readings which can be
represented in different formats. In this paper, only one format is used. In kids’
tracker, GPGGA is the format used by server to find locations then store them
into the database [54]. For illustration, the GPGGA reading given below in Fig-
ure 7 and the meanings of its elements is shown in Table 1.
The parent side is an Android based smart phone. The main hardware plat-
form for Android is the ARM architecture with x86 and MIPS architectures [55].
Since 2012, Android devices with Intel processors began to be commercially
produced in the form of smart phones and computer tablets [56]. Android is
considered an open-source operating system that is based on Linux and it is
created basically to be installed in mobile phones and tablets [57]. On the other
hand, Android applications are usually developed in Java programming lan-
guage using the Android Software Development Kit, but other development
tools are also available.
In the parent side Android application, a background service sends a periodic
“get region” request to the server every 5 seconds. The server replies to that re-
quest by posting the current region of the child after the server has done the re-
quired calculations to determine the type of this region and update the marker

Figure 7. GPGGA reading sample.

Table 1. Description of the data items in GPGGA format [50].

Value Meaning
170,834 17:08:34'UTC
4124.8963,'N 41d'24.8963'N or 24'54"N
08151.6838,W 81d'51.6838'W or 81d'51'41"W
1 Fix Quality: 0 = Invalid, 1 = GPS fix, 2 = DGPS fix
05 5 Satellites are in view
1.5 HDOP (Horizontal Dilution of Precision)
280.2,M 280.2 meters above MSL (mean sea level)
Y34.0,'M Y34.0 meters below the WGS84 ellipsoid
Blank No last update
Blank No station id
*75 Checksum to verify sentence

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 S. Z. Sweidan et al.

on the map and region fragment with a new position. Moreover, the status
fragment with the name of current region will be colored according to the zone,
and the last checked time will be also updated.

4. Implementation and Testing

The application’s Android interface is simple to use and efficient. Kids trackers’
main screen contains a menu list in the shape of a slide menu that is shown in
Figure 8. It has 6 options for the main window including: status, map, regions,
history, settings and logout. Each option has a specific task as will be shown
soon. The user clicks the desired option to move to its’ related window. Using
kids’ tracker starts with a simple login process with a user name and password.
A successful login will lead to a status window by default. The window contains
the name of the current region for a child as it is named by the parent, and co-
lored by the type of zone. It also shows the time of last notification. In the first
login to an account, the status window will be empty until the user defines the
regions for the child. The information that is displayed in the status window is
updated every 5 seconds, and that is done by the background service which con-
tinuously sends a “get region” request to the server. Figure 9 shows a status
window with the current region of a child colored in gray which indicates that
this is not the expected region at this time of the day as defined by the parents
(gray zone).
The map window displays the current location of the child in a graphical form
on a Google map and a marker pin represents the location as shown in Figure
10. The map has specific details of the location including the street name in

Figure 8. Menu list window.

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S. Z. Sweidan et al.

Figure 9. Current region of the child in status

window.

Figure 10. Current child location marked on map.

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 S. Z. Sweidan et al.

order to help parents in finding out where their child is.

Regions window enables the user to add, edit and delete regions. In addition
to that, it allows showing the child’s current region on map with a personalized
name defined by the parent such as school or grandparents’ house instead of the
general street name in maps. Figure 11 represents a sample of the regions win-
dow showing that the child is currently in the school region as defined by the
parent compared to Figure 10 which shows the same location as a Google map
name.
To add a new region the parent has to assign the required location on the map
window then double click Regions on the menu and a dialogue box will appear
as shown in Figure 12. The parent has to fill the name of the new region, and
then set the days and time slots in which it is fine for the child to exist in it as a
green zone. The radius of the new region has to be also set with a maximum
value of 500 meters. To edit or delete an existing region, the user can double
touch a defined region then select from the dialogue box options to either delete
the region with all its details or to edit and change its related information.
The History window provides a very useful feature for the parent to see the
child’s movements’ history record, labeled by the main events such as changing
regions of existence. The history record can be modified to cover a number of
days between one and seven with recommended period of seven days which is
the default.
Figure 13 shows a sample of a child’s movement’s record for one day along
with the visited regions. As we can observe, the child was at home at the begin-
ning of the day (00:00 military time) as expected by the parent. Consequently,

Figure 11. Current region of the child with

school region shown.

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S. Z. Sweidan et al.

Figure 12. Add a new region box.

Figure 13. History record shows the regions that were visited
by the child in one day.

the zone name home appears in green (green zone). However, around 17:25 the
child left home and stayed less than an hour in a region that is undefined by the
parent, therefore, it appears in red (red zone). Finally, the child reached the
school which is a defined region; however, as the time of existence is out of the
expected hours for the child for this region, it appears in gray (gray zone).
The settings window enables the user to choose the type of notifications to re-
ceive; either periodic notifications or alert notifications or both. Moreover, a
deactivation option stops all notifications and updates which may be useful if the
user is with the child and there is no need to track the location. Finally, Kid
name allows giving a real name for the child instead of the default “kid” word
used in maps and notifications. Figure 14 shows the settings dialogue and its
provided features.

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 S. Z. Sweidan et al.

Figure 14. Settings dialogue box.

The last option on the menu is log out and it is used to exit the current ac-
count in case the user does not need to use the application. This means turning
off background service which is responsible for regularly seeking the current re-
gion. Therefore, no notification would be received. When logging in again, the
parent can get the history for the logging out period.
If alert notifications are enabled and the child is out of the defined region for
the current day and time, the parent will receive an urgent instant notification.
Furthermore, when the user opens the notification message, the current location
of the child is updated and shown. Alert notifications will keep reaching the
parent every 3 and 7 minutes for red and gray regions respectively. Figure 15
shows an alert notification for an undefined region which is considered a red
zone.
On the other hand, if the child is in his correct region and a periodic notifica-
tion option is enabled, the parent will receive a periodic notification every 60
minutes as long as the child remains in the green zone as shown in Figure 16.

5. Conclusion
We built a kids’ tracker system that allows the parents to track the location of
their children without the risks related to a child having a cell phone. The pro-
posed system includes a wearable small device for the child that contacts a main
system server which in turn is connected to the parent’s smart phone through a

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S. Z. Sweidan et al.

Figure 15. Alert notification for a red zone.

Figure 16. Periodic notification.

simple yet flexible and efficient application. The application allows the user to
define the regions where the child is expected to be in different days and at spe-
cific hours. The system sends regular notifications to the user with the child’s
location, in addition to alert notifications when entering an unauthorized region.
Moreover, different week days have different region settings and the user can
track back the child’s movement’s history for several days. As a future work, we
plan to enhance both the battery life of the wearable device and to reduce its size
even more besides adding additional tracking options to make the system richer
and more useful.

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