SINGAPORE: Imagine a family day out at Delhi's Pragathi Maidan. Parents can rest assured their kids are safe even if they wander away to exhibits of their choice: they carry a small hand-held device that guides them to the stalls of their choice; provides them a video briefing and a running commentary through headphones of what they are about to see. The system allows them to send short text messages to their parents and friends — or save useful information which they can read at leisure.

Futuristic? Not for too long: On Monday, the Singapore Science Centre launched Asia's first electronic tour guide which does all this, and with an upcoming tracking option that even allows parents to keep tabs on where their children are.

To achieve this, the Centre has joined hands with the island-State's Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) and a local developer, Innovez One, to create a solution marrying two technologies: Wi-Fi or wireless networking (already widely used in India) and an innovative use of over 30 access points to add an "always-on" tracking feature.

Users, who will typically be children 10 years or older, are provided a hand held computer — an off-the-shelf Personal Digital Computer or PDA — which they use to navigate through the Centre's 10,000 sq.m. spread of five galleries and 700 exhibits. Once the child logs on and indicates the subject of choice, the special software ported on the PDA generates a map of the layout, and guides the user to the exhibit, explains what it does through video and voice.

The child can save useful information and background notes — mail them home or share them with friends.

The Centre's Chief Executive, Chew Tuan Chiong, explains that a small charge of Singapore $2 (Rs. 50) is planned for the loan of the PDA and headphones — but this is not expected to recover the total project cost of Singapore $200,000 ( Rs. 50 lakhs) towards which the IDA and a private sponsor — D-Link who provided some of the networking hardware — pitched in.

"We want to reach out, not just to the 50,000 children who visit us every year but to the 1.5 lakhs who are out there in Singapore," Dr. Chew said.

"The possibilities are limitless," feels IDA's Chief Technology Officer, Tan Geok Leng. "The location sensing technology is accurate to 2-3 metres and we can see how this could be used to allow parents to track their children continuously and see that they are safe — by adding a tracking device that the child can wear."

While child locaters are available in the U.S. and elsewhere, these are costly devices that only work outdoors and use global satellite tracking.

The Singapore experiment offers the hope that such services can be made affordable to users in developing nations. The next step? They hope to provide the service soon, not just in English but in Singapore's other two languages — Chinese and Tamil.

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