TagHopper

This report details the development of the TagHopper application. It is intended to complement the AMBER Alert system, used during child abduction scenarios. TagHopper was designed to be a cheap and effective way for parents to keep track of their children’s location. It envisions embedding a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Sensor in various everyday objects used by children. In case of an emergency, a child is taught to trigger the BLE sensor by pressing a panic button. This sensor can be detected by the TagHopper application running on multiple mobile devices. The location coordinates of the mobile phone that detected the sensor are then sent out to a service running in the cloud. Based on the setup configuration, the relevant information is then transmitted to the parents, either through an email or a text message. The advantage of this approach is that it provides parents complete control, by tasking them with deciding whether it’s a valid threat or not. This can be easily deduced based on the location information in the email/text message sent to them. If they perceive it to be serious, they can contact law enforcement authorities else ignore it. This way we can avoid false positives. TagHopper keeps track of all the locations from where the triggered sensor information was received. As a result, it is able to provide a visual crumb trail for law enforcement to follow. This helps narrow down the search area exponentially. The effectiveness of TagHopper is expected to be significant because of its crowdsourcing feature. Therefore, it is very significant to address privacy concerns for it to be widely adapted and this is accomplished by anonymizing the data. No identifiable information related to volunteer phones is ever shared with the recipients. The source phone number is not even stored within the system ensuring utmost privacy