Geofence application will help you get notified whenever an important object enters or leaves an area of your interest.
Introduction
A geofence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. It could be dynamically generated as in a radius around a point location, or it can be a predefined set of boundaries (such as important zones (areas) or neighbourhood boundaries).
The use of a geofence is called geofencing, and one example of usage involves a location-aware device of a location-based service (LBS) user entering or exiting a geofence. This activity could trigger an alert to the device's user as well as messaging to the geofence operator. This info, which contains the location of the device could be sent as an SMS, web notification or to the email account [1].
Geofence applications examples
In this listing, we’ll name just a few real-world geofence applications you may try to implement as well:
- used with child location services, can notify parents if a child leaves a designated area,
- used with locationised firearms can restrict those firearms to fire only in locations where their firing is permitted, thereby making them unable to be used elsewhere,
- it’s critical to telematics. It allows users of the system to draw zones around places of work, customer's sites and secure areas. These geofences when crossed by an equipped vehicle or person can trigger a warning to the user or operator via SMS or email,
- in some companies, geofencing is used by the human resource department to monitor employees working in special locations especially those doing field works. Using a geofencing tool, an employee is allowed to log his or her attendance using a GPS-enabled device when within a designated perimeter,
- other applications include sending an alert if a vehicle is stolen, or notifying rangers when wildlife stray into farmland,
- can be used for location based messaging for tourist safety and communication,
- in a security strategy model, provides security to wireless local area networks. This is done by using predefined borders (e.g., an office space with borders established by positioning technology attached to a specially programmed server). The office space becomes an authorised location for designated users and wireless mobile devices,
- and many more!
You can create and manage multiple geofence instances to support many use-cases.
Use-case: Bear monitoring
Our friend Tom wants to know when any bear enters the feeding area, so he can rest assured that no person is present at the site for the safety reasons. Bears have the GPS location tracking device attached on their collar.
The geofence map creation is as follows:
- The ranger will draw a circle on the map to define the feeding zone,
- Then he’ll specify which devices' location he’d like to track (these are the GPS devices on the collar),
- He’ll then choose to receive an enter alert, and whether to get the notification via email, web or push,
- Finally, the ranger can check if all of his colleagues are not at the feeding site for the safety reasons.
Rather an interesting case, isn’t it?
Tutorial for the geofence creation
We have also created the full Geofence tutorial for your convenience. Do check it out and use this awesome application in the shortest time possible!