Implementation of a Wearable Sensor Vest for the Safety and Well-being of Children

Abstract

This paper presents a prototype wearable vest for improving the safety and well-being of children in nurseries, daycare centres and primary schools. The safety vest is built around the LilyPad Arduino and Adafruit Flora platforms with Xbee radio module, GPS, temperature and accelerometer sensors. The vest will automatically gather and provide information about the location and well-being of the children. Teachers are able to receive alerts and notifications, e.g., when a child moves across certain restricted outdoor or indoor area. All the information gathered by the vest is made available through the web utilising Sensor Web Enable- ment (SWE) services to guarantee a standardised way to manage the data coming from multiple sources. The vest is part of a larger framework to provide digital safety applications and services for parents and teachers.