The safety tags collect a child’s real-time location information, and alert the parents through the mobile app when he or she moves out of a certain safety perimeter. (image: Yonhap)
BUSAN, July 7 (Korea Bizwire) – Korea’s most celebrated beach, Haeundae, is offering smart bracelets starting Friday to help parents keep track of their children. More than 26 million people visited the popular vacation spot in 2015, while 16 million visited during the summer holiday season (July – August) alone. With hundreds of thousands of people packing the beach every day, visiting parents can become quite anxious looking out for their children amid the hordes.
To provide some comfort to troubled parents, the Busan IT Industry Promotion Agency decided to launch a ‘Smart Missing Children Prevention Service’ from July 8, for two months.
To begin with, the agency is offering a free rental service of 300 wearable devices, or ‘Safety Tags’, to tourists. The devices are equipped with GPS and a LoRa (long-range) communications module, and they can be synchronized to a smartphone application.
The safety tags collect a child’s real-time location information, and alert the parents through the mobile app when he or she moves out of a certain safety perimeter. If a child goes missing, the location information is directly reported to the guardians and a nearby police station.
What is noticeable about the service is that it uses LoRa communications technology instead of the usual LTE. LoRa has lower power consumption than Wifi, and has a longer communication range. Therefore, it can minimize battery consumption during long hours of beach activities and more accurately pinpoint a child’s location.
To learn more about the service or to use the service, tourists can visit the Haeundae Beach tourist information center.
By Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
