Harry Potter-Like Clock Tracks Family Members

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Nov. 13, 2007 -- In the Harry Potter stories, Ron Weasley's family of pureblood wizards has a magic clock with hands assigned to each family member, indicating their location.

 

Now a prototype device from Microsoft Research Cambridge does a similar thing. The Whereabouts Clock allows family members to see where others are in four broad categories -- "home," "work," "school" and "elsewhere."

 

Creators hope the general nature of the clock's locations overcomes some of the privacy problems that the researchers think have impeded other location-based services from becoming more prevalent in the marketplace. For example, Sprint's Family Locator shows precise position on a Google Map.

 

"You can buy a service on your phone to keep track of your kids. There is even talk about putting electronic chips into kids, which is not what we want to do at all," said Abigail Sellen, senior researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

 

"We wanted to build a device that was not too intrusive into people's lives, but at the same time recognized the importance of reassurance in a family."

 

Having that reassurance, said Sellen, does not necessarily require precise location information. Knowing that the children are at school or that mom is on her way home from work is enough and can be done with a relatively crude level of location information.

 

The Whereabouts Clock is a modified tablet PC that uses signal information from mobile phones and the network to locate family members. To use it, family members download a software application to their mobile phone.

 

After the software is installed, the first time a person arrives at work, home, or school, she presses the button in the application corresponding to those locations. That tells the software program to lock in on the signal from the nearest mobile phone tower and stores its ID.

 

 

Each time the family member's phone comes into range of one of the towers labeled "work," "home" or "school," the software sends a signal through the network back to the Whereabouts Clock at home. The clock interprets the signal and uses it to move an image of the person's head into the appropriate area. The image moves into "elsewhere " when the person's mobile phone is in an undesignated area.

 

"This tracking system isn't about communicating what people don't know. It's about telling families about things they already know. It's about reassurance and families really like that," said Sellen.

 

Her team tested the device with a handful of families to get specific feedback.

 

Should a person's face move from one area to another, say from "home" to "school," the clock will bong a notification. Family members away from home can also send a text message to the clock that people at home can read. So if mom is going to be home late from work, she can send a note saying as much.

 

"One of the things that's praiseworthy is the way that it accommodates people's privacy," said Bill Gaver, professor of design at Goldsmiths College at the University of London in England.

 

But even with such an ambiguous system, people still might not have as much privacy as they think, said Gaver.

 

For example, if someone's image is in the "elsewhere" region for an extended amount of time, it could raise suspicion.

 

What's surprising, said Sellen, is that none of the test families had issues with privacy. "They explained to us that knowing the whereabouts of family members is about family life. Even teens didn't have a problem," she said.

 

Sellen said that although the researchers were impressed with family testing results and think that there is potential for a product, Microsoft has no immediate plans to create one. For now at least, the magic clock is relegated to the world of fiction -- and magic.

 

 

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/11/13/w...outs-clock.html