GPS Enabled Mobile App for Women Safety, Saudi Arabia

Background

In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to drive. They are mostly driven by a chauffeur and an opaque screen separates the lady sitting on the back seat of the car from the driver (recently these restrictions have been eased in SA). Thus the lady is unable to see the car speedometer and unable to track over speeding. Death from road accidents is the biggest public health issue in Saudi Arabia and over speeding is a major cause.
In the last few years due to expansion in girl education in Saudi Arabia, girl students and woman teachers have to commute to far-flung schools un-chaperoned in chauffeur driven cars. The AMAN mobile App developed by Zivanta Analytics is primarily targeted for them.

Intervention

Zivanta partnered with the University of Ha’il in collaboration with the Ministry of Exterior, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to develop a mobile application targeted at Women, Children and Disabled. The App has two basic functionalities:
1. A Speedometer to give an alert to notify emergency contacts if the vehicle over-speeds.
2. A GPS enabled tracking system by which the child’s or women’s movement can be tracked by her family members when she is on her way to school. Any deviation from the route can be seen by her family members on the interactive map on their mobile device.

Services

The ‘Aman- Safety Mobile App’ will provide users with a
• A Speedometer to give an alert system to notify emergency contacts during over speeding.
• Tracker – A GPS-enabled tracking system ensuring a 2-way tracking. It is a Google Maps integrated screen, capturing user location every few microseconds, thus enabling users to track their location, search where their emergency contacts are, and the nearest contacts from the user’s location in real-time.
• Social Network: Since social media exists because of closely connected communities, this option tries to tap a user’s personal network directly via social media. On clicking this option, it will enable a user to invite friends active on social media. This way of inviting friends attempt to save time too, since even during an emergency situation if a person does not find any emergency contact nearby, but someone outside the app network who might be online on social media at that point in time and hence able to respond by joining the app network and tracking the person in need.
• Email: The email option is provided in the preferences to enable users of the app to patronize and popularize the app so that more connections are able to join this app and use it from the invite email. The objective of this is not user acquisition, but more the number of personal connections of an app user join the network, the better chances are that in the case of an emergency or over speeding, alert functions can achieve the purpose.