Remote-watch for school buses

BANGALORE, INDIA:  NorthStar, an integrated child and school bus tracking and monitoring solution, shared that it has launched India’s first video surveillance system, which can remotely monitor activities inside school buses.

The new web-based system will not just enable live video monitoring of each bus on the school fleet, but will also allow for effortless search and replay of video archives for any bus, it highlights.

Named Netra and Netra Pro, this system can be installed in school buses and will allow school authorities to stream live videos of activities happening inside their buses. This will result in initiating swift actions in case of an eventuality.

School authorities can log on to the NorthStar console and effortlessly navigate through their entire fleet of buses, select any bus and watch live video by using a laptop or a tablet from virtually anywhere, it explained and added that the intuitive NorthStar administration console allows school authorities to remotely search, view and download the recorded / archived video files from days and even weeks in the past.

"School bus security has become a high priority in recent times for parents and schools. Netra and Netra Pro will help schools alert officials to potential threats and provide video evidence of thefts, assaults, bullying, violence, damage, rash driving and other malicious activity. More importantly, it serves as a deterrent to potential culprits by reducing or eliminating such incidents from occurring."

As  Shyam Ramamurthy, CTO, NorthStar adds, “We are pleased to launch Netra and Netra Pro, the first ever integrated school bus video surveillance system in India. This system will not only monitor the bus driver’s actions but will also help in keeping tabs on the safety of children in the bus allowing managers/ supervisors to take appropriate actions should there be an eventuality. He further added that our tracking systems have become the school’s Virtual Transport Administrator which can manage the bus fleet, perform route management and can monitor activities inside every bus. Our state-of-the-art devices help school authorities monitor the inside of the school bus at all times to check on unruly children and negligent or rash driving by drivers. It is a complete “peace-of-mind solution” for parents. This technology enables the schools to provide complete safety for children.”

The new system enables storage of the video recordings for a period of 40 days thus ensuring that delayed complaints, if any, can also be addressed at any point of time with evidence.

This also helps schools in building a relationship based on trust with the parents even as maintaining a vigil on the bus personnel. Shanthi Menon, Principal of The Deens Academy, Bangalore said, “Child safety and security is one of the important concerns we face and NorthStar services have helped in addressing this. It has also helped us in building a relationship based on trust with parents. We are looking forward to the Netra product line as we believe it will greatly enhance the safety & security of children.”

As the company elaborated on the functioning: The unit constantly communicates with the NorthStar server in the Amazon EC2 cloud and reports on various parameters including the health of the system – whether the entire camera system including the recording process is working properly or not. The system records each and every activity that happens in the bus. All of these units can easily be accessed from the school administrator’s computer / tablet or hand held through the standard NorthStar administrative console that they are already familiar with. The school administrators can check the health of every system on their entire fleet of buses, stream live video in real time or download video from the archives at the touch of a button. Data in the system is secure and can be accessed only by select school officials who have an authorization from the NorthStar administration.