Tinitell is essentially a wristband, which allows the concerned parents to call and track their child since this wristband is basically a wearable phone and a GPS tracker. Tinitell will be one of the smallest commercial mobile phones that are available to the consumer market once it is launched. The wristband will work either via voice recognition or through the click of a button. The wristband doesn’t come with a delicate screen so the child need not take it off while playing. It is also splash proof and can withstand quick dips in water. It makes use of voice recognition so if a child was to say ‘mom’ or ‘dad’, the watch will dial the corresponding number and the child will be able to talk to them. Of course children will be able to manually search for contacts as well.
The wearable cell phone comes in four colours and has all the essential functions you’d need to make sure your child is safe.
Founder Mats Horn came up with the idea for Tinitell while cooking dinner with a friend who had a young son. The boy wanted to go outside and play but he didn’t have a cell phone. He’d lost a phone once before and the adults didn’t want to lend their expensive smartphones to a child. As they were busy in the kitchen and couldn’t accompany the boy, he had to stay indoors and play on an iPad.
Horn says this incident reminded him of how much he loved being outdoors as a kid. He decided to design a simple phone for kids so that parents could let them out and call them back easily. “Nothing advanced, just a nicely designed speaker and microphone to handle quick ‘hellos’ and ‘come heres’,” he explains.
The device just needs a GSM SIM card to be inserted into it before snapping it onto a child’s wrist like a bracelet. It has a single, large button and voice-recognition software so the wearer only has to push the button and speak the name of the person he or she wants to call. The tough waterproof material is suited to handle playground tumbles and other feisty behaviour.
Parents can control and monitor the device remotely from the Tinitell website (www.tinitell.com) or from their smartphones via the official app. They can also restrict outgoing and incoming calls to pre-set contacts and assign numbers that will be answered automatically without the child having to press the button. There’s a bonus safety feature too: an inbuilt GPS that communicates the wearer’s location.
Horn raised over $140,000 for the Tinitell project on Kickstarter and has started taking orders on the website, though the products will only be shipped in April 2015. A Tinitell “wristphone” currently costs $129. It works in most countries, including India.