Mobile trip monitoring and journeying system

Abstract

It is a trend for people to go hiking at weekends in recent years, as the public noticed the important of doing exercises after SARS in 2003. However, with the increasing trend of hiking, hiking-related incidents also increases. In some cases, due to the poor mobile network coverage, and lack of knowledge of the victim, it is hardly for the rescue team to find out their position easily which bordered their rescue work. So, it is necessary to have a method which can exactly locate the hiker who calls for help on handheld devices. With the development of GPS and GIS, we can now easily tracking people‟s location. These technologies can be applied to different areas like tourism, child and elderly tracking. There are already some electronic maps which support GPS in the market, but they seem cannot provide location specific information to the user automatically. Despite of existing of navigation system, it only limited to drivers used. With the increasing of hiker-related accidents, this project aims to design and implement a system that not only can provide hiker traveling information, but also monitor hiker‟s position to enhance safety by give the hiker warning message if he is going to a wrong route. On top of this, it also let third party to monitor the hiker position on the web or via SMS. Another objective of the project is to lead the user pre-planned some tasks for them to do during the trip, and the system will pop up the reminder or message about those tasks when the user is near the target point. Besides, it will also provide a sharing trip‟s experiences platform to the user by recording the trip and save it as a portfolio for them to sharing with their family on the web. So that the hiker can review what he have visited and done in the trip. Throughout this project, different location tracking technologies will be examined. And technical problems like Graphical User Interface (GUI) design on PDA phone, using of GPS technology, transforming datum, using of web service and monitoring whether the user is outside their pre-planned path for giving alert will be discussed and overcome. The project would be useful for developing other tracking and tour application in the future.