Hyderabad police add ‘track me’ feature to HawkEye app

HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad police is now coming up with another initiative to make women travel more safer. The new option called ‘Track me’ in the HawkEye application which would be part of ‘Women travel made safe’ would help the police to identify if the passenger’s route deviates from the designated route.

The existing option for ‘Women travel made safer’  has a facility to report and share the details of travel, but the new option would help them to chose if their journey needs to be tracked by the police. Two more options that would be added are ‘Help’ and ‘Reached safely’.

If the passenger presses  ‘track me’ button, a pop up would emerge on the TV wall at the central command control center in the police commissioner’s office. Once the passenger enters starting point and destination, a notification will be sent asking the passenger to chose one of the two options ‘track me’ and ‘help’. If the passenger selects ‘track me’, the route chosen will be displayed on the screen.

“Any small deviation in the mentioned route, will generate an alert to both the police and also the passenger,” said a police officer, who is part of the IT team.

“The passenger on reaching the destination, need to press the last option ‘reached safely’, otherwise, tracking will be continued and deviation alert will be sent.  Until the mobile phone stops functioning, the passenger’s location will be under scanner, as the application is being developed to work even offline,” said the officer.

Currently, the service provider only receives a message notification about the emergency, but cannot track the passenger’s location based on the GPS, whereas the new option will send an alert to the police with the location of the passenger to ensure the nearest patrolling vehicle reaches out to the passenger.