Years ago I was researching alarm systems for the elderly (in fact my Masters thesis was on this topic). We built small radio transmitters that our subjects would wear around their necks on a ribbon. In the event of difficulty they would press a large red button which would activate an auto-dialler attached to their telephone and call for help. Our very first incident taught us an important lesson – the subject who was wheelchair-bound had ventured into the garden and toppled over, chair and all. Unfortunately he ended up trapped by the neck – the ribbon from the transmitter (and the transmitter itself) under the fallen wheelchair. Luckily he was spotted by an neighbour shortly afterwards and was none the worse for wear.
I mention this now as one of the things that we are considering with LocoMatrix (following discussion with CEOP and others)is whether to have a “panic button” as a feature. If youngsters playing a game (or at any other time) got into difficulty, they could press a button (or sequence of) to send out an alert which would show up on our servers. What has come up in our discussions is whether this would be a good idea or would it be subject to abuse and false alarms (do youngsters abuse the emergency services with their mobiles?) and if we were to implement this service, who would we alert – police, parents, our own monitor? Or are there unforeseeable outcomes such as we found with our system for the elderly.