How often do you misplace your mobile phone? Most of the time, they disappear and turn up at some unimaginable, inaccessible place like under a pillowor a blanket or hidden beneath newspapers and books.

There is one standard way we use to find them – get someone else to call on your number while fervently hoping you haven’t put it on silent mode. If the phone has a remote alarm feature , you can activate the alarm so it rings even if the phone is in silent mode.

But what do you do if the phone has been switched off? Well, there is no other option than to start a frenetic search for the elusive device.

Or what if it is your wallet that is missing? Or your keychain? What if your keychain had fallen off somewhere on the road? Yes, you can go looking for it, but there is a limit how much you can look. What if the keychain has been buried under a pile of sand or garbage?

You may think I have gone nuts if I say you can use your mobile to find your keys under the little pile of garbage.

No, I don’t mean you clear the garbage with your mobile. This involves doing something before you lose your keychain or wallet. It is a small button-sized device that will help you. These small Bluetooth-enabled devices have to be stuck to things (such as a wallet of a keychain - things you are likely to misplace) beforehand. You can then use an app on your smartphone to track whatever you have lost.

These tiny trackers usually work within a 100 feet range. As you enter this range, the app will pop up an alert on your phone and will tell you how far you are from the item. However, it doesn’t really tell you which direction you should walk towards to retrieve whatever you’ve lost. . So, you just have to move around the place and keep checking.

There are many companies that make these buttons or stickers. StickR TrackR, Stick-N-Find and Tile are some of them. Tile works only with iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad Mini, iPad 3rd and 4th gen, and iPod Touch 5th gen, but not with Android devices.

SticR TrackR and Stick-N-Find can be used with Android devices too, apart from iOS devices. Some, like Stickr Trackr operate on a two-way technolgoy. “Not only can you make your StickR TrackR beep from your phone, the StickR TrackR also has its own button that allows you to make your phone ring, even if it's on silent!,” says the official web site.

As helpful as these might seem, these digital trackers have their own downsides. If another user who has the app installed comes near your lost wallet, he will also be alerted to its presence. The best that can happen is you will get an alert that someone else is getting closer to your lost wallet – along with his/her GPS co-ordinates. But Tile does not have this feature (as a security measure), to make sure only you have access to the lost item. You can also set it in a way that you are alerted if you are leaving a designated area without the item like forgetting your phone on the table while getting out of a restaurant.

Enough talk about phones and wallets getting lost though! What if you are on a trek and YOU got lost? Of course, if you have one of these stickers or buttons in your wallet, anybody coming near 100 feet of you can find you. But what if you are in a remote location?

Woodland, the outdoor adventure gear brand, has come out with a ‘ResQ technology’, which is a two-part system that consists of a detector used by rescue teams and a reflector worn by skiers. Using a directional signal, the reflectors integrated into Recco-enabled outerwear direct rescuers to the exact location of the wearer that allow rescue teams to pinpoint a person’s location.

Woodland claims the “detector sends out a highly directional signal and if the signal ‘hits’ a reflector it is bounced back. The returned signal is translated into an audio tone whose volume is proportional to the returned signal, and by means of a volume control a trained rescue operator can literally go straight to the buried reflector once a signal is detected.” What this means is a high-frequency signal bounces off a reflector built into the jacket. Next time you go on a trip, it’s better to have one of these jackets and a few sticky buttons.

>dinakaran.rengachary@thehindu.co.in

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW