AtSight: A Wearable–Mobile Architecture for Bidirectional Child Safety Monitoring and Guardian-Initiated Intervention

Wearable and mobile technologies can support child safety when continuous direct caregiver supervision is impractical. Existing solutions commonly provide location tracking, geofencing, or child-initiated emergency signaling; however, these capabilities are often evaluated as individual monitoring functions rather than as coordinated safety-interaction pathways. This study presents AtSight, an integrated wearable–mobile architecture that combines a child-worn Apple Watch, a guardian iOS application, and cloud services for location, communication, and safety-event management. The architecture integrates location and geofence monitoring, child-initiated SOS, guardian-initiated HALT, voice-message communication, and multi-guardian access within a bidirectional safety model. AtSight was developed through requirements elicitation, iterative design and implementation, and complementary technical and user-centered evaluations. In the original technical evaluation, HALT end-to-end response times ranged from 1 to 6 s for 20 participants, while no delivery failures were observed in the evaluated multi-guardian alert scenarios. Additional controlled benchmarks conducted during revision included 50 event-level HALT trials, all successfully delivered, with a mean end-to-end latency of 4.094 s; 50 location measurements, with a mean coordinate discrepancy of 0.380 m relative to Google Maps pinned reference coordinates; and 50 geofence boundary-crossing trials, of which 49 (98%) were successfully detected and delivered to the guardian. The formative user-centered evaluation involved 20 participants completing an 11-item study-specific five-point Likert questionnaire and four follow-up interviews. The findings support the preliminary technical and interaction feasibility of the AtSight prototype under the evaluated controlled conditions but do not establish real-world child-safety effectiveness. The principal contribution is the design, implementation, and controlled evaluation of an integrated architecture combining monitoring, child-initiated escalation, and guardian-initiated intervention pathways using consumer wearable and mobile infrastructure.