USF patent would make cellphones an interactive crime-fighting tool

It can be handy to have a global-positioning tracker in your cellphone. It knows where you are so it can guide you straight to a restaurant or help you check traffic on the road ahead.

A group of engineers at the University of South Florida has designed a new location-based system that enables you to do more important things with your phone. Like helping save a child from an abductor.

The engineers received a patent in October for what they call their high-tech neighborhood watch, or officially, a Wireless Emergency-Reporting System.

Its beauty, said lead inventor Sean Barbeau, is its simplicity.

"We just used existing software and equipment," he said. "It's not dependent on a lot of expensive equipment being installed."

Not that it was simple to create. The research began more than a year and a half before USF applied for the patent in 2006. It arose from a project on people's transportation behavior.

The transportation research depended on participants keeping travel diaries, but researchers knew these notes would be inexact, so they began tracking the participants using phones with GPS.

Philip Winters of USF's Center for Urban Transportation Research said they began wondering what else they could do with GPS-enabled phones — and the photos and video people record with them.

That was about the time of the 2005 terror bombings of the London transit system. The USF researchers heard about people trapped in the underground trains. Many were taking photos with their cellphones and sending them to emergency responders, but the rescuers didn't have the information to find them.

Imagine, the researchers thought, a system that would transmit people's photos with time and location identifiers, and allow emergency workers to send information back.

It would be a way of getting a lot of eyes and ears on a situation, Winters said. And it would target their efforts on an area of interest, which can work better than a scattershot broadcast that can be easy to ignore.

Here's how it would work, for example, in the case of an Amber Alert.

Noting the location where a missing child was last seen, police could send a message and pictures to cellphone users in the vicinity describing the situation, like a reverse 911 system.

If a person seessomeone who fits the child's or suspect's description, the person could snap a picture and send it to police.

As others do the same, the police dispatcher could create a map tracking the reports moment by moment, block by block, expanding the circle of cellular contacts as information comes in.

"It enables this back-and-forth conversation with somebody at a Web page who can see the pictures and video on a map," said Barbeau, a transportation center research associate and doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering.

"This costs so little to deploy; any community could do this."

Barbeau and the other researchers used low-cost, widely available equipment, writing software to link them in the unique way that earned them the patent. Funding came from the Federal Transit Administration through the University Consortium for Intermodal Safety and Security.

Others sharing the patent with them are Rafael Perez and Miguel Labrador of the computer science and engineering department, and Nevine Georggi, a researcher at the center.

The designers realized that some people might worry about authorities using technology to monitor their movements. To address privacy concerns, they designed their system so that people would have to volunteer to receive alerts. Even those who opt in can shield themselves when they want by turning their phones off, Winters said.

Winters and his colleagues envision a dozen uses for their creation, including hurricane preparation.

Emergency planners could text users' information on what they need to do, based on whether they're in an evacuation area and, if so, which area. It could, for instance, include the location of the nearest shelter and whether it accepts pets.

Winters and Barbeau worked on a similar, simpler system that's in development. That system is for disabled people who use public transit, tracking them as the bus moves along its route and sounding a reminder as their stop approaches.

They are working with USF's patent-licensing office to get their high-tech neighborhood watch into the real world.

"We were really ahead of our time when we started," Barbeau said.

Now, nearly six years after they filed for the patent, Winters said, "we really want to get it out there."