Protecting People on the Move through Virtual Personal Security

Abstract

Ensuring personal safety for people on the move is becoming a heightened priority in today’s uncertain environment. Traditional approaches are no longer adequate in meeting rising demands in personal security. In this paper, we describe VIRTUAL PERSONAL SECURITY, a research prototype that demonstrates how technologies, such as ubiquitous surveillance cameras, location-aware PDAs and cell phones, wireless networks, and Web Services can be brought together to create a virtualized personal security service. By incorporating automatic service discovery, situated sensing and multimedia communication, the novel solution provides consumers with increasing availability, lower cost, and high flexibility. It also creates a new market for just-in-time micro security services, providing the owners of surveillance cameras a new revenue stream.