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Session 2525

Designing Global Monitoring System to Locate Missing Children and Alzheimer Patients

Mark Rajai, Hugh Blanton East Tennessee State University

Abstract

This paper presents a joint effort between engineering students from various majors, and their advisors to design a sophisticated global monitoring system to monitor location of children, Alzheimer patients and other valuable items. This project was part of a capstone design course developed to introduce engineering students to real world problems. This funded project was developed in response to growing problems with children abduction and wondering off Alzheimer patients. This invention has received extensive media coverage since its development. Over 30 million people worldwide heard about the project and its abilities through various media channels such as TV, Internet, radio, and newspapers. This paper discusses the development process from conception to finished product.

Introduction

Child abduction is a major problem at this time and the number being abducted is growing each year. In fact, as many as 150,000 children are reported missing in the United States alone each year. Many of the abductions occur under circumstances wherein the child is in the company of a parent, such as at a shopping mall, but the parent is preoccupied with shopping, and the child is abducted. In response to this problem, engineering students and their advisors at East Tennessee State University have been working on designing devices to combat this growing problem. The Lemelson Foundation provided the funding for this project1.

In this paper we discuss the problem, provide a detail market research and introduce the earlier versions and final version of the product. Due to pending patent on this invention the detail descriptions of the product are omitted.

Background and Overview

The earlier version of “Guardian 2000” was designed and developed under name of “Safe Distance Locator Device” to mainly prevent child abduction. The product received extensive national and international media coverage because child abduction is a growing problem in this country and abroad2,3,4. However we realized that product have many other application such as monitoring elderly and Alzheimer patients. We received thousands of emails, phone calls, and letters from individuals and companies from all over the world, expressing interest in buying or

“Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering education Annual Conferences & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Blanton, H., & Rajai, M. (2001, June), Designing Global Monitoring System To Locate Missing Children And Alzheimer Patients Paper presented at 2001 Annual Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 10.18260/1-2--9097