Feature Focus: Safe Zones

How many times have you told your kids to “text me when you get there!” only to have them forget and cause you to panic?

We know that kids forget things- they’re kids after all, but that doesn’t make situations like this any less stressful for parents.

Thankfully, Safe Zones gives you a bit of extra peace of mind by letting you know when your child arrives at or leaves a certain location.

But what exactly is a Safe Zone? It's a geo-fenced radius around locations of your choosing - think of it like a circle around your home or school, on a map. When your child arrives or leaves (or if they don't at all) the Spacetalk App will let you know via a Safe Zone Alert.

Safe Zones can be set up at any location, whether that’s your child’s school, after school activity, a friend’s house, your home or another home in a co-parent family.

For example, if your home and your child’s school are both listed as Safe Zones, you’ll get a notification when they leave school and another one when they get home. This is handy if you’re at work and your child has started catching the bus home by themselves.

Let’s run through how to set up this amazing feature on the Spacetalk app.

App set up
Once you open the Spacetalk app, you’ll find the Safe Zones icon on the map screen. To add a new Safe Zone location, tap on the purple '+' button to enter the address and give the location a name. It’s that easy!

You can also set a radius around the location, from 140 meters up to one kilometre. Safe Zone notifications will trigger once your child’s Spacetalk device enters or exits this radius.

Safe Zone alerts
Once the Safe Zone has been created you will need to setup Safe Zone alerts. For this to work you must also enable automatic location updates.

To set an alert, tap on a Safe Zone, for example your child’s school, and tap “Manage Alerts”. This will take you to the Edit Alert screen.

This is where the magic happens. From here the Safe Zone is fully customisable. You can choose to get notifications for a location on certain days of the week, get notified if your child hasn’t arrived or left the location by a specific time, as well as receive a notification if they leave the location earlier than the set time- no more sneaking out of class!

When Safe Zones come in handy

Safe Zones are useful in all kinds of situations:

• Know when your child has left an area when they shouldn’t have.
• Not having to keep asking if they made it to school on time let’s kids develop independence.
• Peace of mind knowing you can step in if your child isn’t where they’re supposed to be.
• Working parents can quickly glance at their notifications to know if their child has arrived at a Safe Zone.
• Added level of reassurance knowing if your child has wandered off when staying with another parent, family member or friend.

Safe Zones are an added level of reassurance for parents when it comes to kids travelling on their own.

Being able to customise the radius, days of the week, departure and arrival times of each Safe Zone means you can act quickly if your child isn’t where they’re supposed to be.

For more information on Safe Zones and Spacetalk’s many other safety features, head on over to the Discover page on our website.