It's every parent's worst nightmare: You're in a crowded mall, and one minute your child is by your side--the next minute they are gone. Panicked, you're searching in every direction to see where they might be. Each second feels like an eternity until you eventually track them down.
It's a feeling John Renaldi knows all too well (he once got separated from his child at Maggie Daley Park in Chicago), and one that he hopes to eliminate with a new wearable device that helps parents keep track of their kids at all times.
Renaldi, a former Motorola executive, founded Jiobit, a small tracking device that attaches to a child's clothes and sends alerts to a parent's smartphone when they've left their side. It uses a combination of GPS and beacon technology to track where the child is, and it can also measure heights--like if the child is on the top of a slide or on the third floor of a shopping mall.
The device, which is about the size of a quarter and available for pre-order later this year, attaches to a child's pants or shoes and boasts battery life up to 640 hours. Jiobit also has a machine-learning component that understands your child's daily routine. For example, over time the device learns that your child goes from home, to school, to after school and back home. If the child's location diverts from their normal pattern, the parent gets an alert.
The idea is to give parents greater peace of mind and have better knowledge on the whereabouts of their child, Renaldi says.
In the audio interview below, Renaldi sat down with Chicago Inno to talk about how Jiobit works, the security measures the company takes to prevent the technology from getting hacked, and how one day he hopes Jiobit will be so small that it can be woven into the fabric of your child's clothes.
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Image via Jiobit
