Missing Children and The Technology That May Find Them
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According to federal statistics, there are about 115 child abductions by strangers every year in this country.
Unfortunately this week we had another in the Jacksonville area. The community of Orange Park is in shock following the abduction of 7-year-old Somer Thompson who was walking home from school. By Wednesday, two days after her abduction, her body was found discarded in a Georgia landfill.
Somer and her family are in our prayers. Nothing could be worse.
The first 24 hours after a child goes missing are crucial for finding her and entrepreneurs have been frantically working to come up with devices that allow us to track our children, similar to a way we track vehicles.
Many people think that microchips, put under the skin, help you find a child. But when put into our pets, they allow shelters to run a scanner and obtain information on the owner. They are not tracking devices.
The VeriChip Company makes VeriKid, used in Mexico where they put scanners in public places kidnapped children may be. VeriChip was primarily developed to hold a patient’s medical information and it does not contain a transmitter and is not satellite-enabled.
Wherify GPS Personal Locator combines GPS and digital wireless technologies to pinpoint a wearers position within a few feet. Parents can view satellite or street map or call an 800 number. Cost is $800 and $30 a month to monitor. Parents lock the bracelet onto the child’s wrist, which could be removed by a perpetrator.
Amber/AlertGPS is a small gadget that tells parents where their child is at all times. It features a button you child can push when they are in trouble sending out an SOS signal to five preselected people on their mobile phones and email addresses. The little square is placed in their pocket or backpack. It can also be used for speeding teenagers.
Again it's not cheap. At a cost of $379 with tracking plans ranging from $10 to $60 a month, it’s a little too costly for most parents.
GPS T80G Tracking Watch calls itself the world’s smallest watch. It contains a built-in GPS and looks like something a child would watch. It too comes with preset areas and sends out an SOS when the child leaves the area.
Lok8u is a real watch that tells time. If the watch is forcible removed from the child’s wrist an alert with location information is immediately sent to the parent’s cell phone. Parents can set up safe zones for the child. The cost is $200 with a $10 monthly monitoring fee.
There have always been bad people in the world and the community is on alert hoping and praying that this perpetrator is found soon. More than 1,000 tips have been called into investigators, but the identity of the bad guy is still a mystery.
Too bad he doesn't have a GPS device.
Maybe someday reliable and affordable technology can help us find missing children quickly. But today many parents are just relying on keeping them a little closer.