Underage citizens monitoring applications - a review of the state of the art and guidelines for future implementations

Children's safety is a constant concern, both for parents and the institutions in which they are entrusted with care. There are several dangers and situations that can jeopardize children's safety. It is, therefore, important to have constant monitoring and preventive monitoring. This need, together with the technological means available nowadays, opens the way to the development of applications that allow better safety and monitoring of children's daily activities. The aim is to keep parents informed about where their children are and if there is anything they should be worried about. In this context, an analysis of the state of the art was carried out to identify the functionalities currently available to users of applications with this purpose. Through this analysis, essential functionalities were identified, such as real-time location on the map, location history, marking of safe areas and sending alerts. On the other hand, technological advances in various areas mean that there is room and opportunity to add value to what already exists and to contribute to answering existing problems. Therefore, in this article, besides the state of the art previously mentioned, it is also presented implementation lines for new mobile applications that may be developed in the future. The contributions of this article are, on the one hand to present what currently exists in terms of mobile applications to support the monitoring of children and on the other to propose lines of new features that current technology can provide in new applications.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio