It is the fact that all the people who use digital devices are worried about them getting lost or stolen.

Losing a digital device is usually a huge pain for the device owner not because of the device but due to the other financial and security information that is saved in our phones and goes with the device.

One has to compromise with confidential and sensitive data ranging from email password, bank details, personal data and the like. Based on the survey that ESET conducted in conjunction with Harris, 1 in 10 device-owning adults reported device theft.

IBM is coming up with a solution to minimize such instances of mobile device misplacement by utilizing social network of a user to find his missing device.

They have recently filed a patent application that detects the theft/misplacement of device and sends notification to a person who is associated with the device owner’s social network account.

How Smartphone Misplacement Detector of IBM will Save your Device

According to the patent application IBM has invented a monitoring program that can detect misplacement of your smartphones or tablets by using RFID tags.

The RFID tags can be glued on personal items like wallet, sunglasses, bags and the like. The radio signal emitted by smartphones is received by the RFID tags and its transponder in turn responds with a returning radio signal. In this way the smartphones and RFID tags communicate with each other.

When no signals will be received from the RFID tag for a considerable amount of time, the misplacement analyzer will confirm device theft or misplacement.

Suggested Read – RFID Tags – Making Things Talk to Each Other

In the next step the misplacement analyzer will collect GPS information of the device and other information like to-do list, calendar events. The to-do list and calender events will help in determining the location of missing device.

After collecting this information the misplacement analyzer will access device user’s social networking information and will determine a “best person” from his social network.

The best person will be the one who is in close vicinity to his mobile device. A notification will be sent to user’s friend about the misplaced device and its probable location.

The notification will contain information regarding theft/misplacement of device, GPS information and direction heading to the device.

Lets take an example, suppose John misplaced his device. The device misplacement and GPS location is detected.

The analyzer identifies one of his friend Kerry from John’s social network who lives in vicinity of current GPS location of the misplaced device. It will then send a notification to Kerry like:

“John’s mobile device is missing and last time it was detected near 54th Street and is .5 miles from your location. Here is the map to reach to the device”

A map will be provided to assist Kerry to reach and collect the missing device. As the smartphone misplacement detector provides direction heading and map to user’s friend thus makes easy to locate the missing device.

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