Harry Potter-Like Clock Tracks Family Members

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.