Track your kids — now with WiFi

Posted Dec 14, 2005, 10:00 PM ET by Marc Perton
Related entries: Misc. Gadgets, Wireless

If you want to use wireless tech to keep track of your wayward offspring — and you happen to live in Japan — you can now choose among GPS, RFID and WiFi. A company called AeroScout is working with Nissan, NTT and others to test its T2 WiFi-based tracking system in Yokohama. The setup automatically notifies parents as children proceed along a predefined route (i.e., walking to school), and kids can alert parents to problems by pressing a button on the WiFi tag. Passing motorists using the correct equipment can also track the kids. Somehow, we don’t quite see this one panning out. Not only would the area under surveillance have to be blanketed with access points for this to be effective, but access-point failures would inevitably lead to false alarms — and the idea of random drivers tracking kids just creeps us out. (And wouldn’t it make just a little more sense for the system to alert parents when the kids stray from the path, rather than pinging them to let them know everything’s hunky dory?) We think the Japanese should give up on all of these tags and just give the kids cellphones. Face it, that’s what they really want, anyhow.