Location Monitoring and Tracking System

Abstract

It is fortunate that an efficient, accurate, and, most significantly, a free service called the Global Positioning System (GPS), is available to every citizen for positioning purposes like seeking paths for getting to a place. Under the 4-dimension GPS schema, that is, the latitude, longitude, altitude and time, GPS is being used extensively by companies and institutions for carrying out their daily work or satisfying their everyday needs. It is especially indispensable to those position-oriented industries such as aviation, railway transportation. Other industries like agriculture are also using GPS to perform their everyday tasks. Individually, with the existing implementation as a GPS client on many mobile phones, all citizens owning a GPS mobile phone could connect to GPS satellites and update their current positions anytime, anywhere while walking, traveling, and driving. In addition, various applications that apply extended location tracking functions of the GPS technology for different kinds of mobile phones have been developed. Users are not only able to track their own locations on an electronic map, but they are also able to find out the locations of their friends using varied GPS applications like “Google Latitude”. All in all, the quality of many public services and the standard of living of human beings are improved because of the invention of GPS and the availability of the GPS service. However, there are a number of limitations in these existing GPS applications, “Google Latitude” in particular, which could be overcome while these applications were being developed. “Google Latitude” is not developed in an automatic way, which causes the application awkward to use. Experiments have showed that manual updates of the users’ location information to the “Google Latitude” centralized database are required, in which the goal of real-time location tracking could not be achieved. When users are not doing unremitting updates of their locations, old location data which are not appropriate for sharing will finally be sent to their friends and cause confusions. Under this design algorithm, people who are not able to do manual updates are most likely to suffer from severe predicaments in desperate situations. For disabled people, lost children, fainted hikers, murdered and kidnapped people who are impossible to renew their locations actively, it is of critical exigency for others to seek their locations and rescue them. Thus, it is without doubt that there are needs to confront these problems and propose solutions. In fact, the application should be developed using a more interactive approach by letting the users to carry out direct communication in real time. Furthermore, inlaying an automatic activation function into the client side, it may be regarded as an ingenious idea. That is the weight-bearing point of my project, the Location Monitoring and Tracking System (LMTS). LMTS is a system which could totally solve the above problems. LMTS is a mobile application of the platform Android with version 1.5 or above. It is written in the Java language. With LMTS, communications would be done directly and interactions are carried out only when there are needs for performing location tracking. With this new and refined structure implemented in LMTS probably in every popularized GPS mobile phones, road guidance from our best friends could be obtained when we go astray, missing hikers could be found by the police and get their lives saved in an utmost speed, and our mobile phones could also be found by using our friends’ mobile phones. This is the distinct point of my response-free real-time location monitoring and tracking system. This report aims at introducing and explaining the development of this project thoroughly. In addition, it tells how LMTS performs the location tracking tasks in a reforming way that the existing GPS applications are doing. To do so, a clear description and explanation of the development regarding LMTS will be justified. To start with, an introduction on the topic will be given, which is a background of the issue, the reasons and aims of building the system. Next, in the second part, an existing system of GPS, “Google Latitude” will be introduced. After that, a thorough investigation into the system design of LMTS will be taken in part three, which is followed by the implementation of the system design in part four. In part five, there will be an in-depth review of the limitations of LMTS. Finally, a conclusion of the whole development project will be given in part six.