Any experience with "Geo-Fencing"?

[mathnerd]

I have a pretty beefy monitoring system for my kid using their iPhones, however, there is one glaring hole. I need to physically access the app to find out where they are. It has come to my attention that my "problem child" has been skipping school and has, at least once, snuck out of the house in the middle of the night. Given his history, this is a very, very bad thing. So I went in search of apps that might alert me if he left a pre-determined area. It turns out that this is a thing, and it's called geo-fencing. I'm starting the process of reviewing apps, but I was hoping some people here might have some experience with the various apps out there and how good they are.

I need something that will automatically alert my phone if the kid leaves a certain area (home, school, etc.) preferable with the ability to set times. For example, I'm more lenient on a Saturday when they're with a friend's parents than on a school day when they're supposed to be at school or in the middle of the night when they're supposed to be home and in bed. I really don't want to be alerted at 6AM when they leave to go to school, but I do want to know if it's 7AM an they haven't arrived. In my perfect world, it would be flexible enough to program in their various schedules, so I don't have a bunch of alerts annoying me, causing me to eventually ignore an important one.

Any ideas?

[mjr]

mathnerd:

I'm not quite sure I understand how this works. Is it one of those GPS sort of things that alerts you? I mean, I'd think if the kid left his phone in his room/at school/wherever, it would then become ineffective in tracking him.

I get the general idea, I just don't know how effective it would be, if he decides to just leave his phone somewhere because he knows mom is watching...

[wolfie]

Don't know whether any of them are available for the PhrootFone, or how much they cost, but you might want to check out some truck tracking apps. Geofencing is a big thing in the trucking industry for trying to catch stolen equipment in near-real time. If trailer "X" is supposed to go from the shipper in city A to the consignee in city B, these applications make it easy to set up a fence around the shipper, the quickest route to the interstate, the length of interstate between the cities (with "wiggle room" so it doesn't alert when the driver goes off the highway to a truck stop), the route to the consignee, and the consignee. Don't have any experience with this - I'd be on the "getting monitored" end rather than the monitoring end.

[Crossbow]

I was thinking the same thing, Wolfie. I know our software handles geofencing, but the notifications are on the dispatch side, and that software doesn't run mobile. We can track the GPS signal on a cell phone easily enough, though. I'd be really surprised if there were no other mobile apps out there to do exactly that.

*EDIT* In fact, I know at least on Android that it's possible. I have a app that switches my phone to vibrate automatically when I enter a geofence area that I set up. In this case, I set it up for any of the movie theaters I visit. I pull into the parking lot, and my phone automatically goes silent. I leave, and it comes back on.

As for using it to track someone else's phone, that I've never done myself.