14-year-old Chennai boy develops i-Safe app for women in distress

, Jan 29: In the wake of increasing atrocities against women, a 14-year old boy from Chennai has developed a mobile app that he has named i-Safe. An SOS mode in the app, when activated will repeatedly send SMS alerts to family and friends, pre-fed in the app, giving the location details.

It does not stop at that, he is now working on it to rope in the local community so that they can come for help during a distress call, without delays caused due to police.

The technical feat of S. Arjun is not restricted to that. A class VIII student, he had developed an app called Ez School last year, which won him the first place in an app contest organised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This app helped parents trace their children's school bus and also calculate the time the bus is going to take to reach its destination. While smartphone users can use the app easily, basic handsets can also use it by SMSing.

He has also won an App Inventor Bug Finding Contest organised by MIT.

The teen prodigy now dreams big: "I wish to have my own company called Lateralogics to make it something like Google and Microsoft," he said in an interview to NDTV.

Arjun's proud parents say that he spends 2-3 hours on the computer, learning programming languages. They are also happy to support with the right kind of tools required for his work. "Programming helps children develop many life skills like problem solving, decision making, etc. and that's one reason my wife and I encouraged him towards this," said his father Santosh Kumar.

OneIndia News