GPS Locator

• Lesprance Batiste
• Monyett Crump
• Alvaro Sahagun
• Raul Moreno

According to the U.S. National Center For Missing and Exploited Children, there were 27,000 missing children cases reported in 2018. Where 10% of those cases involve child abduction, lost children, and critically missing young adults, ages 18 to 20. The objective of our project is to provide children and young adults the ability to send their GPS location to a parent or guardian at the push of a button during any kind of emergency situation. The parent or guardian can then track their child’s location and aid law enforcement in finding their child. In the case of abduction, children and young adults may not have a phone to contact a parent or guardian, or their phone may be stolen in the process. Our device will serve as an affordable, accurate, and dependable secondary emergency contact tool that will be discreet and secure with a focus on providing long-lasting battery life (> 10 hours), high GPS accuracy (< 3 meters), and cost less than existing competitors. Our hardware has no 3G connectivity, which means that it has no wireless mobile telecommunications capability so it cannot connect to the internet. However, by using a low-cost pay-per-use mobile carrier, such as Ting, the device will be able to communicate with other cellular devices. Despite many misconceptions, GPS technically does not need an internet connection to function. The device will be able to gather GPS coordinates on its own, but without an internet connection, it would not be able to display the location image. The way we intend to handle the coordinates our device gathers is to insert those values into a pre-tested Google Maps link and then send that information through SMS to the parent’s or guardian’s phone, which should have internet connectivity to display the location of the device.