August 5, 2002
A Device to Track Missing People
When Samantha Runion, Danielle van Dam and Elizabeth Short were snatched from their homes, parents everywhere shared the dread and sense of helplessness of the girls' families. How do you find a child who has simply vanished at the hands of a stranger?
It is at times impossible. But technology does exist that can pinpoint a person's location using orbiting satellites. Now an inventor who originally wanted to tap the global positioning satellite system to find her runaway dog has won several patents for applying her idea to following and finding people.
Jennifer Durst, a single mother from Oyster Bay, N.Y., and two partners have patented a lightweight, portable G.P.S. transceiver that she says is designed to be "form-fitted into a backpack, a baseball hat or a belt," for example. Ms. Durst, Eugene Fowler and Joseph McAlexander have received one patent for a "pet locator" and two more for a "mobile object locator" that can be used to track animals or people. The Patent and Trademark Office has notified them that their fourth patent has been approved, although it has not been issued yet.
Their devices can be programmed with boundaries, and if those boundaries are exceeded, the devices send messages directly to a cellphone, pager, two-way personal assistant, traditional phone or even an e-mail address. Those messages are followed by continuously updated geographic information, she said.
"Up until now, a G.P.S. device could tell you where you are," Ms. Durst explained last week, just days after her latest patent was issued. "But it doesn't tell me where you are. What I've done is make it, `Now tell me directly where you are.' "
"I hope we don't get to the point where our kids have to sleep in their own homes with this," she added. "I'm sorry about the negative association that comes with the news of these poor abducted children. I had hoped this would be a warm, fuzzy application, a way for parents to feel better at an amusement park."
Nevertheless, she said she could envision it being used several ways — "if my daughter was playing on her bike in front of the house or out in the yard."
A parent would program the perimeter of the yard or neighborhood into Ms. Durst's gadget. Those coordinates could be changed or updated at any time. If the child went for a walk with a parent, the adult could use a password to suspend the boundaries.
When the person wearing the gadget leaves the specified perimeter, an alert is sent to a designated two-way radio device. Location information follows in the form of text, figures, graphics or numbers, and is updated every few seconds, in effect following a person down a street, through a neighborhood or around an amusement park.
"It could say, `Elvis has left the building,' " Ms. Durst explained, "and would update the location until the pet or person is recovered."
If the tracking system is removed for any reason, an alert and last known location are transmitted. Ms. Durst said she also designed a model that incorporates a "panic button" so someone in distress can send their own alarm about their location.
Ms. Durst said she designed the system to notify the person back at the home base directly. Other G.P.S. systems send data to a central computer.
"I don't want to have to contact a call center," she explained. "I don't want to wait online to find out where my kid is."
The device weighs about seven ounces, though Ms. Durst said she hoped it would become smaller as the technology advanced. It runs on a rechargeable battery and picks up its G.P.S. signals with a flat, patchlike antenna.
Even though abductions by strangers — like those of the Runion, Van Damm and Short girls — are rare, countless children are temporarily lost every year in crowded amusement parks, at the beach and in shopping malls. Adults are also often lost in a variety of ways, too: Alzheimer's patients sometimes wander off, hikers and mountain climbers disappear in the wilderness, soldiers go missing in action. Ms. Durst says any of these people could be tracked with precision if only they were linked to the G.P.S. system.
But the idea actually started with her dog.
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| Ed Betz for The New York TimesJennifer Durst, a mother from Oyster Bay, N.Y. has invented a locator for pets and people using the global positioning satellite system. She had the idea for the device when her dog, Hank, became lost. Hank now wears the device on his collar. |
"About three years ago, I was searching for my lost dog in the pouring rain," she recalled. "I'm a divorced mom with two kids at home, and I had an invisible fence, but my dog would just break through it. I had the choice of once again piling the kids in the car at night to look for the dog, or leaving the kids at home alone.
"Needless to say, I put the kids in the car and drove around in the rain, with everyone crying over the dog," she said. Her search made her think about the tracking system called LoJack that many people install in their cars. "I thought, there's LoJack for cars, so we should have LoDog," recalled Ms. Durst, who did not find the dog until the next day.
With two partners, Ms. Durst began work on a pet locator, a lightweight and programmable receiver-transmitter that used the G.P.S. and could be embedded in a dog's collar.
"After the initial application for the pet locator, the other applications became obvious," Ms. Durst said.
She and her partners have several prototypes, including one that is part of a child's fanny pack and could be rented to parents at amusement parks like Disney World, and one for the military that she said "will send the location of a soldier directly to a platoon leader or to each other."
She hopes that at the very least, her invention will mean "you'll never see those `Lost Dog' signs again."
The system for tracking children or adults is not available for sale yet, even though Ms. Durst and her partners have a Web site at www.gpstracks.com that offers information about the dog-finding collar. Ms. Durst estimated the system would cost about $300, plus a monthly subscription fee. She and her fellow inventors, Eugene Fowler and Joseph McAlexander, have won three patents: the pet locator is 6, 172, 640, and the "mobile object locator" received 6,236,358 and 6,421,001.