SafeTracks Theme: Women’s Safety

Background In the last few decades, there has been an increase in women professionals in India. Globalised businesses compel professionals to work late night to meet client demands from across the world. With the entry of numerous new players in the mobile phone market, android phones have become very affordable.

Problem Financial and personal independence is a woman’s right. But this sometimes necessitates travelling alone, at late hours or unfamiliar places. Given the increase in crimes against women, what can we do to ensure that women could carry on with their lives, fearlessly?

Solution Proposed here is an android app that would help the user to share her location while travelling outside with a trusted person, without constant intervention, irrespective of the mode of transport used (walking, bus, taxi, rickshaw etc.)

About the app SafeTracks is a personal safety app, which helps a trusted person track the progress of a journey the traveler makes in real-time It can also be used to raise an alarm and get help.

Users Primarily women – working professionals, students etc. who have to travel alone during late hours. The app can also be used for minors who possess mobile phones, so that their parents could keep a track of them.

Sign In Both the tracker and trackee should install the app Secure sign in using Google for both tracker and trackee

Security – Server side Authentication Click on Track to send Google AccountToken and Registration token ( for device identification) Both tokens are authenticated on server side Combination of Google sign in on client side and Token verification on server side, prevents spoofing and privacy breaches.

Start Tracking Simple interface for the trackee – enter the tracker and click on button

Location Updates Nothing more for the trackee to do – the location keeps getting updated in the background and sent to the server & tracker In case of any issue, trackee can raise an alarm

Notification The tracker will get a notification via GCM ( Google Cloud Messaging)

Tracking View On click of the notification, the tracking view is displayed – Blue icon is the starting location Further notifications happen silently in the background and the view auto-refreshes tracking the journey

Reached Safely On click of “Reached Safely” by Trackee, the tracking notifications end with the green marker.

Alarm If the trackee has raised an alarm, the icon is shown in a violet hue It also brings up a notification on the tracker’s mobile to attract attention, so that tracker can get help

Technology Stack Server side – Node.js, Meteor, MongoDB – Meteor is an upcoming full-stack framework on Node.js REST APIs – The server side app has been designed to expose all functionalities as REST APIs Android Native App - Java Google Maps Google Cloud Messaging – for Push notifications – Latest innovation by Google to support notifications real-time at low battery Google Sign-In – for authentication. – Combination of server and client authentication of google credentials and device instance id to prevent security breaches

Thank You