The role of technology in enhancing the safety of our children

Shyam Ramamurthy

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing," said Albert Einstein.

Children mean the world to every parent. They are anxious about their safety and well-being. There are 1 million schools in India where over 200 million of our children study. 75,000 of those schools are private and they impart education to 45 million children. 27 million of those children use school transport.

While parents strive to create a safe environment for children at home, it is equally the responsibility of the school management and the transport providers to ensure a safe environment for children whether in the bus or at the school premises. The threats to children's safety can range from school bus accidents, bullying, bad behavior from staff on the bus or just unforeseen delays in commute. While every concerned stakeholder has the intent to keep children safe, keeping an eye on every child in every situation can be a daunting task.

This is where technology can be a force multiplier for key stakeholders! As Einstein said, parents and school management cannot "look on and do nothing!" . We owe it to ourselves and our children to use every bit of technology that can help improve child safety. A combination of sophisticated tracking of children, the bus fleet, cloud-based analytics that can detect "unusual" conditions and an alerting system that notifies the stakeholders so that they can take prompt action will hugely enhance the safety of children in every situation. Some of the technologies that find use in such a system are :

1. Sophisticated tracking systems - Using state-of-the-art RFID, Bluetooth-low energy and location technologies, sensors that constantly detect, capture and stream events to an intelligent cloud-based analytics and alerting platform

2. Integrated video surveillance systems with analytics - on the bus and in school premises

3. Cloud based services that are integrated with the tracking and surveillance systems that use machine learning and powerful analytics to detect abnormal conditions and alert stakeholders to take action

4. Rock-solid reliability - The entire system would perform a "health check" upon itself at all times and report any issues so that corrective measures can be taken immediately. Reliability of such a system is of utmost importance

There are three key aspects to how technology can improve child safety:

1. Technology as a deterrent : The very presence of a fail-safe monitoring system or a video surveillance system, deters perpetrators from indulging in bad behaviors because they know they are being monitored

2. Technology as a catalyst for improving safe behaviors : It has been our own experience that insights gained by constant monitoring and analytics through technology can greatly improve safe behaviors. We found that drivers develop several unsafe driving habits such as over-speeding, harsh braking, starting late etc., that eventually lead to school bus accidents. Neither the drivers nor the school may be aware of the extent of the problem. Technology can create powerful data-based visualizations of such habit patterns for each driver on a periodic basis which the school can use to assess their transportation safety. The schools and transport providers can then create a system of incentives and disincentives to improve safe driving and discourage poor driving habits. This results in a huge reduction in accidents.

3. Technology can enable self-help communities : Mobile applications on parents' phones integrated with such a system can create "safe volunteer communities" that can help each other. For eg., in the event of an incident, technology can automatically detect a set of parents nearest to the location of the incident and prompt them for an initial response, in addition to alerting law enforcement agencies, the school, the transportation administrator etc.

We live in an increasingly unsafe world. Children travel over long distances to reach school and given that both parents work in a majority of homes, the anxiety levels tend to be very high. Cutting edge technology can be a force multiplier, a pervasive and alert watchdog for our children's safety. These capabilities when coupled with cloud based intelligent analytics and alerting become a powerful tool in the hands of parents, schools and transport providers in ensuring children's safety.

The author is co-founder and chief technology oficer, Northstar