The Whereabouts Clock works by using cell phone data. When a family member’s cell phone is on, it automatically transmits SMS messages to the device when that person moves from one registered zone (such as ’home’) into another registered zone (such as ’school’). Registering these zones only needs to be done once for each zone when the software is first installed. Thereafter, users need do nothing except switch on their phones. If they do not wish to be shown on the clock, they simply switch the application off. Additionally, users are given the option of texting in more specific information about their activities in each zone. So, for example, if a person is ’out’ but shopping, they can text ’shopping’ and the text will appear under the person’s icon on the Clock.
Source: Sellen, A., Eardley, R., Izadi, S., and Harper, R. 2006. The whereabouts clock. In Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’06). ACM Press, 1307–1312.
Brown, B.A. T., Taylor, A. S., Izadi, S., Sellen, A., Kaye, J., Eardley, R. 2007. Locating family values: a field trial of the whereabouts clock.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/sds/whereabouts_clock.aspx
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/hci2020/press.html
