A final year student of Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) Mithila Harish has developed a mobile app for women’s safety and has bagged the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation (GYTI) Award for it.

Studying B Tech in Electronics and Instrumentation, Mithila said she was concerned over the growing danger to women and children as  they were being subjected to kidnapping, acid attack, rape and extortion and wanted to help them using the tools of technology. The distressing situation can be both mental and physical.

Along with a professor who was her guide, the student developed a voice-activated app on the Android platform that would help women in distress by providing the location information through an SMS to trusted emergency numbers stored in the mobile phone. “This would certainly help improve the chances of detection and prevention of crime,” she told Express.

The app recognises voice command of the user. Supposing a woman screams a keyword such as ‘danger,’ the app would automatically alert the emergency number. The app is a combination of early warning and tracking services aimed at providing a degree of succour. Broadly, its functionality spans situation-sensing, situation-recording locally and situation- broadcasting.

The biggest strength of the tool is that the solution aims at providing  both the obvious and simple features such as GPS-tracking and the more subtle and complex ones such as phrases recognition, probabilistic tracking and device-hopping solutions.

“I faced conceptual and methodological challenges in implementing the advanced technology in the app. Keeping battery and memory capacities of the phone are some of the  practical issues,” she noted.

source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Tamil Nadu / by V. NarayanaMurthi – Vellore / April 30th, 2014