The leading provider of safety applications for mobile users

Converge Magazine: According to Security on Campus Inc., a veteran nonprofit organization dedicated to student safety, September is a notoriously dangerous month for campuses nationwide. With freshmen eager to explore their new stomping ground and make new friends, and returning students needing to get reacquainted with old safety principles, September is often characterized by a recrudescence in incidents. In these perilous times, campuses need all the help they can get.

Fortunately, students and campus police can now harness the potential of inventive GPS applications -- both affordable and easily deployable -- to make sure that help is never too far away in case of emergency.

Someone to watch over me
Old methods, such as video cameras and emergency phones placed in strategic areas, safe walk programs and other similar initiatives, have already gone a long way in improving student safety. However, when it comes to safety on campus, more is always better.

Campus security is a logistical challenge. Providing one-to-one protection to a host of free-roaming, late-night-studying, young adults is simply not feasible. But thanks to cutting-edge technology, universities can get closer to that goal, and all it takes is answering a simple question: What do students have with them at all times -- really, all times -- that can also double as a safety tool? The answer: a cell phone, of course.

"Students live and breathe by their cell phones," said Raju Rishi, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Rave Wireless, a provider of campus safety solutions. "They're always charged; they're always in their pockets; it's one of the critical components of their lives."

Leveraging this ubiquity, in combination with the fact that a FCC mandate requires all new cell phones to be outfitted with GPS chips, many companies have begun to explore location-aware, wireless-enabled safety solutions -- and campuses nationwide are implementing them.

Rave Wireless created Rave Guardian, a student-centric application that functions in two modes. In the "passive mode," a student sets a timer for a pre-determined period -- for instance, the time it takes to walk from the library to the dorm -- by calling or speed-dialing a toll-free number that leads to Rave's interactive voice response system. The student can simply key in the chosen time -- say, 30 minutes -- but also has the option of leaving a detailed message, describing his or her clothes and destination. Once the student hangs up, the system is on, though in passive mode.

"What we do for the next 30 minutes is we 'bread crumb' you," Rishi said. "We get your location, minute by minute."

Five minutes before the timer's expiration, the student is sent a reminder that the system is still armed and prompted to either extend the timer or disable it by entering a PIN code. If the student fails to react or enters the wrong pin code, the case goes from passive to active.

Students who feel immediately threatened can also go directly into "active mode" by entering their PIN code plus one. This feature acts as a panic button, instantly warning campus police.

Jose Valdes, associate director for telecommunications at Colorado State University (CSU) -- Fort Collins, which has tested Rave Guardian and is planning to launch it by this winter, said the system was full of interesting features. For instance, if an assailant notices that a student has armed Rave Guardian and prompts the victim to disable it, the student can enter a wrong PIN code and still generate a call for help.

"It looks like it's been disabled," Valdes said. "But in reality, it's now sent an alert to campus police, which the department can recognize as being one number off and react accordingly."

When such an alert is triggered, the profile of the student in trouble pops up on a campus police monitor designated for that purpose. The profile contains pertinent data, such as a recent photograph, height, allergies and most importantly, GPS coordinates that pinpoint the exact location of the incident. With that information, the closest campus police officer will rapidly be dispatched to the scene.

At this time, GPS coordinates are only available with cell phones that are on the Sprint and Nextel networks, but Robert Jones, director of marketing at Rave, said that Guardian will soon be compatible with other networks, starting with AT&T by the end of 2008. In the meantime, students with other wireless carriers can still benefit from Guardian.

"Guardian can be activated and used by anyone, on any phone, on any network. When you're calling from a carrier where we don't yet have that GPS pinpoint in place, it will ask you if you would like to record a message," Jones said, adding that, in the message, a student could still record valuable information such as clothing and destination. "That could be a great piece of information for the police to help on that case."

Rishi said that students have been using it for various circumstances and not just for late-night walks from the library.

"Some people will use it when they go to a party, a social event, and they'll turn it on for four or five hours," Rishi said. "And if I know that everything is OK, at the end of the party, I'll get an alert and I'll turn it off. If I don't turn it off, it's because something happened."

As is often the case in GPS-related applications, fears of Big Brother are never too far away. However, Rishi stressed that privacy concerns are not an issue.

"The university can never know the location of a student unless that student has: a) activated the application; and b) the timer has expired," he said, adding that before then, the only thing that the university knows is that an unknown student has activated the service and that it is in passive mode. "Only when that timer expires, or somebody puts in his or her panic code, which is the pin code plus one, does the university police know who that student is."

With GPS services gaining popularity, Jones said that tracking concerns are slowly vanishing.

"There are so many things you can do with that information on a scale from fundamental importance like safety to just fun uses like finding an ice cream shop," he said. "It's been proven over the last couple of years that it's something that consumers are more comfortable with. We used to hear more concerns about Big Brother... but now people are really starting to see the value of it."

No more waiting in vain
Students at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., saw another way to use GPS for safety purposes. Their buses, known as Joey, would sometimes run late, leaving them to stand in the snow and rain at night, wondering whether they had just missed the last shuttle and how long they would have to wait for the next one.

"Students were angry or upset that the bus wouldn't come on time," said Matt Shapanka who spearheaded the project and is the treasurer of the Tufts Community Union Senate (TCU). "If it's midnight and it's raining or snowing -- there's a definite safety issue."

So TCU decided to put GPS trackers on Joey buses so that students would know when to expect them. The project was entirely student-driven and achieved through a public-private partnership with Ublip, an Addison, Texas-based company, that specializes in GPS solutions. It provided the school with the first GPS tracker at no cost, along with a year of free service. The students designed and maintain a mash-up Web site, joey.tufts.edu, which overlays the shuttle's GPS coordinates on a Google map. After the first shuttle was outfitted with the GPS device, the system worked so well that the university decided to equip a second bus with it.

"We're also working on a text messaging capability, so you can send a text message to an e-mail address, and the machine will text you back the location of the shuttle bus," Shapanka said. "I'm working with Tufts Web communications to create a mobile version, so people with mobile Web browsers can look it up online as well."

Other universities are also being proactive in designing GPS-enabled public safety solutions that suit their campus' needs. The Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley, offered a course in spring 2007 that prompted students to create solutions that made their peers' lives easier. According to the course's wiki, many student groups considered GPS applications, with one group designing a pepper spray bottle with a built-in GPS panic alert system for their final project.

Trends and Laws
In August, Congress signed H.R. 4137 -- the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008, an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965. The new act compels universities and colleges to use state-of-the-art methods and technologies to improve campus security and be prepared in the event a student goes missing. GPS solutions could help universities comply with the new law.

Though community colleges typically don't offer on-campus housing, and therefore are not bound by the missing student provisions, Jones said they could still benefit from location-aware personal safety solutions because of the mobile nature of their students.

"Community colleges don't have a very residential population in most cases, and they don't always have a full-time sworn police force," he said. "But what we're finding is that they obviously have a student body that's arguably more mobile than just about any other."

To be in compliance with the law, some higher education institutions, such as New Jersey's Montclair State University, have made Rave Guardian mandatory. CSU, however, will keep it optional, but make opting in or out an obligatory part of the registration process. CSU students who choose to enroll in the service will enjoy it free of charge.

"The university does not charge the students for [Guardian]," Valdes said. "It has undertaken the cost of the service because it adds to the safety of the campus; we feel that these services can assist in doing that. So the university has absorbed the cost of implementing and keeping the services active."

As universities strive to comply with H.R. 4137, Rishi said, the role of GPS-related safety tools will become increasingly important.

"When people start looking at what they need to do and what they're required by law to do, I think it's going to be an interesting trend," he said. "I think you'll see a lot of people gravitating toward these sorts of solutions."