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Help me design and test a new location based safety app
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For years I've had the need for a location based safety app, and have not found what I was looking for. (A few weeks back, I asked others here what they were using, and that didn't give me a solution either.)

So I decided to make my own, miaalert.com - see signature for link. The site is currently live and free to use; so give it a try if you like.

I've created a basic app that does exactly what I needed, but I'm hoping there are others out there with ideas they'd like to contribute. So I'd like to ask for your help and inputs.

What's different about what I have so far:
  • It's not an app, its a website. Nothing to install, runs anywhere.
  • Alerts are processed from the servers, not your phone. So alerts fire even if: you phone breaks, your battery runs out, you lose cell coverage, etc. But you can use the website from anywhere where you can login to the internet to manage your alerts. (This feature is important: If you go into an area without cell coverage, and get stuck/injured, the alert fires and has your location as of when you lost cell coverage.)
  • The alerts are generally "passive"; nobody is notified unless your alert expires.
  • The recipients of your alert do not need an account to receive or view your alerts.

    • These last two are also different from a lot of the current options, where people are tracking you all the time, and everyone has to have an account on the same app.

What I have:
  • Basic 'set a timer, send alert to someone if I don't cancel the timer before it expires'. This can be done from any device, no smartphone required.
  • Above, but using a smartphone and providing location tracking since starting the timer.
  • Above, and you can send a link to anyone which lets them track your location, live, even prior to the alert.

What I'm thinking about:
  • Alert on being stopped. (In this case, stopped also means the server quit getting location data from your phone.)
  • Auto-cancel alert on reaching a destination.
  • With auto-cancel on reaching a destination, I could then implement multi-point alerts. I.E. "Alert if I don't get to point A in 1 hour, then alert if I don't get to point B within 30 minutes after that, etc.
  • Since I'm capturing location data I could save a GPX file for later upload to Strava, Garmin, etc.
  • Display a running/cycling computer interface on the phone. (Interfacing with BLE devices is possible, but not ANT+)
  • Boundary alert. (This is more of a "family" type alert. I.E. let me know if my kids go beyond some point. So doesn't really fit with my use case, but maybe...)

That's it. What do you think? Do you have ideas? Note, there is no payment, now or in the future, for any ideas you provide. But, you may get a service that provides just what you asked for :)

Paul

2015 USAT Long Course National Champion (M50-54)
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Re: Help me design and test a new location based safety app [Paul Dunn] [ In reply to ]
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How much battery drain is there when using this (I know it's hard to generalize, but even specific examples would be helpful). Garmin live track isn't perfect, but because it shunts the GPS responsibility to their hardware, the phone battery impact is pretty minimal (or at least minimized). That would be my biggest worry with any fully on phone option - draining the battery too much so that I can't use my phone in an actual emergency.

The dead man switch feature is interesting, although I think I'd want the cancel/pause when I reach a destination, otherwise I feel like I'd probably forget to turn it off a bunch. Is there some audible/vibration alert with a cancel window before the alert fires off on your smartphone? If Garmin's incident detection didn't have that I'd have sent out a bunch of false positives from hard braking when they were first rolling it out (fwiw it seems better these days).
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Re: Help me design and test a new location based safety app [andrewjshults] [ In reply to ]
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Battery: The battery drain is about the same as if you just had your navigation running, with the screen off. The biggest factor is actually screen usage. I dim the screen quite a bit, but the user can further reduce brightness so that the screen is almost off. I'll try to take some data over the next few days and add something to the FAQ.

Alerts: I do have a pre-alert setting that defaults to 5 minutes, but you can change it to whatever you like. When that alert is hit, the phone will vibrate. I also send you a pre-alert message as a email. (Delay on sending email is usually less than about 30 seconds; I.E. pretty fast.) That will cause you to get a notification on your phone, smartwatch, etc., that you have an email.

And I agree with the need for auto-cancel, because I don't want to send false alerts.

2015 USAT Long Course National Champion (M50-54)
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