A public safety application of GPS-enabled smartphones and the android operating system

While the Apple iPhone single handedly redefined the term “smartphone” during its first two years of release, Google's Android platform for mobile devices has quickly developed into a serious open source alternative. We explored the Android Operating System (OS) and software development environment and evaluated several of its capabilities by constructing a working application. This application collected speed and location information from the Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, used the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API) to determine the location of nearby schools, and sounded an alarm if a person drove over the speed limit in a school zone. The platform proved capable of supporting a melding of different services, and we believe such smartphones have broad applicability to public safety problems.