Smart Mobile Phone Usage Restriction by Extending Phone Circuitry — An Alternative to Jamming

The use of Jammers to restrict mobile phone usage has always been a very common application. Jammers work by blocking all communication signals in the target area. A major drawback of this approach is that a person can't be accessed even in an emergency. Furthermore, our present-day jammers have no control over other nuisance activities like loudspeakers usage in mobiles. Our proposed system overcomes both of these limitations. The core idea of the system is to incorporate an additional circuit within the mobile phone that contains a receiver exclusively meant for receiving signals to lock mobile phone's keypad and loudspeakers. In zones requiring silence, a transmitter circuit is placed for sending locking signals. The receiver within the mobile receives the locking signal, which upon successful decoding locks the keypad and loudspeaker. The applications of this idea are numerous, one of which discussed in the paper is to restrict mobile phone usage within an automobile only when the vehicle is on the move while at the same time ensuring that the driver's accessibility is not compromised. This idea has been implemented only in a basic Celkon mobile since a basic mobile provided a simplistic setting to test the feasibility of the idea faster. Extension to a smartphone can be easily achieved using the same approach.