Posted by : Anonymous on Aug 05, 2004 - 01:49 AM WebTechnology

SAN JOSE, Calif. - It's every parent's nightmare: You take your children to an amusement park jammed with people. Distracted for a moment, you turn around and they're gone, vanished into the crowd. At Paramount's Great America in late July, Jennifer Winding's 5-year-old nephew ran off to see a Spongebob Squarepants character strolling nearby. Later, her 4-year-old daughter headed in a different direction when she spotted Blue the dog from TV's "Blue's Clues."

But the watchlike devices the kids were wearing on their wrists helped ease anxiety about losing track of them. Part of Great America's Star Watch program, the wristbands broadcast a signal to antennas scattered throughout the Santa Clara, Calif., amusement park. A central computer then tracks the children's location and sends the information to seven interactive kiosks placed around the park. If parents become separated from their children they can find them by going to a kiosk and waving their Star Watch over a reader. A screen will show them the location of each member of their group.

Tracking children has become yet another use of a technology called RFID, for Radio Frequency Identification. Manufacturers and retailers are beginning to attach RFID chips to products to keep better tabs on everything from laser printers to shampoo. Now there's growing interest in using the technology to help parents keep track of their children within the confines of an amusement park, a shopping mall or even a school campus.

"I think it's a great system," said Winding of Brentwood, Calif. "When I was here as a little kid, my sister got lost in the park and it was very traumatic for my parents," she said. "I remember that vividly."

Promoting such peace of mind is the idea behind Star Watch, said Regan Kelly, co-founder of SafeTzone Technologies, the Laguna Hills company that installed the location system at Great America. "This is not a substitute for parental supervision. It's not an electronic baby sitter. It's a tool for families and groups."

The Star Watch devices rent for $5 a day. Besides using the kiosk to see where other members of their group are, users can send and receive messages among themselves and even locate the best path to the nearest restroom.

But Star Watch sales have been slow so far this season, averaging about four groups a day using the system, said Gwen Bambarger, Great America's merchandise operations manager.

One possible upgrade to the system: Allowing groups to put money on their Star Watch account so they can buy snacks and other merchandise in the park by scanning their watch into payment readers.

"Everything is electronic these days," Bambarger said.

"I think people will be interested in something like this."

Because RFID signals travel only over short distances, Great America has been divided into 63 zones. Antennas in each area pick up the Star Watch signals so people don't get caught in "dead zones."

At a mall near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., SafeTzone is gearing up for the opening of Wannado City, department store-sized "role-playing theme park" that will entertain children while their parents shop.

The RFID technology allows the children to roam freely throughout the "city" while letting the care providers track their movements and find a specific child's location at any given moment.

A similar system, involving a mix of RFID and wireless technology, is popular among parents and staff at a Legoland in Denmark and has proved valuable in reducing the time it takes to find a lost child.

"Every time you need to get multiple people out of the park looking for a kid in a red jacket, it's labor intensive and no one is happy," said Andris Berzins, vice president of marketing and business development for AeroScout, the San Mateo, Calif., technology company that developed the Legoland system.

Mark Roberti, editor of the RFID Journal in New York, said radio frequency technology is ideal for confined spaces such as a shopping mall. But he noted that a short-range device wouldn't work well, for example, as a way of locating a child who doesn't make it home from school.

"It can't be read from a satellite or from a police car," he said, adding that the wristwatch or even an identification card can be removed from the child's body. "Even if it were embedded under someone's skin, which I think is a horrible idea, it wouldn't read very far."

In Los Gatos, Calif., Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's Wheels of Zeus start-up promises to deliver a wireless system that will, among other things, let you "know where your loved ones are," according to the company's Web site.

Gina Clark, Wheels of Zeus' vice president of business development and marketing, declined to discuss specifics about the company's technology or future products.

However, she did say that the company's research has determined that working and commuting parents are concerned about the safety of their children during work hours and want some high-tech reassurances that the kids are OK.

"We found that parents wanted to know that their children were in a safe place, that they'd gotten to school safely or to a neighbor's house," Clark said.

While some features of RFID can be viewed as beneficial, the use of the technology to track people has set off debates over privacy.

Authorities at a school in Osaka, Japan, recently said they will begin tagging students' nametags or clothing with RFID chips so they can track them as they enter the school grounds and move around the campus.

Roberti of the RFID Journal said he can see the advantages of such a system in a school but there's at least one major problem.

"I don't think people like to be tracked," he said. "There's always going to be that kind of a trade-off between security and privacy."

For parents such as Winding, who spent a day with children at Great America recently, any trade off for using Star Watch was worth it.

"It's so easy to lose the kids because they get so excited in the park and sometimes run off," she said. "This is a great backup system."