Cell Phone Monitoring for Your Family’s Safety: Mobile Phone Monitoring Apps and More

Contents:

• What Is Cell Phone Monitoring for Your Adult Family Members?
• How Does Cell Phone Monitoring Work?
• When Is Cell Phone Monitoring Needed?
• How To Monitor Your Relatives Living Alone Without Invading Their Privacy
• The Number One Safety and Wellbeing Monitoring App for Your Family

Safety monitoring for family members can sometimes be overwhelming. It can be quite difficult to check up on elderly or young adults through frequent calls, especially when you live far from them. But thanks to technology, you can now enjoy hassle-free mobile phone monitoring solutions that oversee the safety of your family through phone activity tracking, panic buttons, emergency alerts, and much more. 

Mobile phones integrated with monitoring software are proving to be essential tools in the healthcare and wellbeing industry. In the right hands, they help responsible adults keep track of their children's safety and ensure the wellbeing of seniors in the family, no matter where they are. Fortunately, nowadays, you need not invest a fortune. Today, you can find a cheap (for more functionality) or a simpler free phone monitoring app with just a few clicks on your mobile device.  

However, before installing the next app you come across, make sure that you do your due diligence to ensure you end up with a user-friendly, trustworthy safety app. The ideal app should offer continuous activity tracking with real-time data and error-free emergency alerts. It should also provide a precise report on user location and send emergency alerts to the emergency contacts when the need arises.

Learn about mobile phone monitoring, who needs it, and how to check up on your adult family without invading their privacy. 

What Is Cell Phone Monitoring for Your Adult Family Members? Definition and General Overview

Cell phone monitoring refers to the collection of user data, i.e., GPS location, movement, or phone activity over mobile phone networks.

Mobile spy apps are known to track and report private conversations, images, video, call logs, and other private information. Unobtrusive safety monitoring apps, on the other hand, only collect health-related data such as sleep patterns, movements, and vital signs, depending on the type of the app and the permissions granted. This paints a clearer picture of the user’s health, safety, and comfort at home.

How Does Cell Phone Monitoring Work?

Cell phone monitoring works in two main ways:

Network-Based Monitoring

Network-based monitoring is a tool used to locate a user’s device. Mobile phones communicate with nearby phone antennas through electrical signals. IT experts use this communication to calculate the user’s precise location through the network service provider. Using complex systems, they can measure the strength of the signal between the base station and the target device to estimate the user’s accurate location.

Device-Based Monitoring

Device (also handset-based) monitoring is powered by user-installed software. Data is collected through the mobile app from the user’s device. The user installs an app, which then collects information. 

Device-based monitoring requires the user to install the app first. Some apps require permission to access certain features in your phone like GPS location, weather, call history, emails, texts. This can help protect the user’s privacy while providing personalized care services.

Mobile phone apps work with health monitoring systems to provide excellent care services. They can also be integrated with wearable devices and remote health monitors for improved home care.

When Is Cell Phone Monitoring Needed?

Cell phone monitoring is most frequently used for health-related self-monitoring or by caretakers to monitor the health of patients under their care. Today’s advanced and less intrusive options can also be used to check up on a loved one living or traveling miles away. Most of the time, however, it is used to monitor the safety of the most vulnerable family members, i.e., children and the elderly.

For Safety Monitoring of Children

The internet connects millions of people worldwide. Although this facilitates fast communication, the internet can also present many dangers for minors. That’s why you need a parental control app.

Parental control apps monitor your children’s devices. They check texts, emails, track their location, backup data, and scan for inappropriate websites and social media profiles used by scammers. The more advanced apps keep track of your child’s activities across iOS and Android phones, windows, mac, and Chromebook devices with social media filtering, app blocking, web content filtering, and a detailed activity log. The more advanced the app, though, the more costly it would be.

Senior Tracking and Monitoring

Aging seniors, too, need constant monitoring due to the challenges they face in everyday life: after all, aging comes with hearing loss, cataracts, and refractive errors, just to mention a few. Many seniors are also at risk of dementia, mental health issues, heart disease, and critical conditions that need constant monitoring. 

There’s no better time to introduce your elderly family to senior monitoring apps than now. About 61% of adults aged 65 years and above own a smart cell phone, according to research by Pew Research Center. This is the perfect opportunity to teach them about cell phone monitoring and how it can help with quick response to avert catastrophic events.

A senior monitoring app could come with a variety of features, ranging from general wellbeing and safety monitoring with a simple panic button to more complex apps offering location tracking and phone inactivity monitoring, or a medical app with vitals monitoring and instant doctor-patient connection.

Compare the functionalities and prices here.

Sole-Person Household Safety: How To Monitor Your Relatives Living Alone Without Invading Their Privacy

When tracking an adult person’s activities, you do not want to invade their privacy. They have a right to live normal lives without feeling like they’re being watched all the time.

With that in mind, here are some considerations to keep in mind for non-intrusive safety monitoring:

• Don’t use spy apps or apps for children’s safety monitoring. Select a safety and wellbeing monitoring app that only tracks safety-related information that your family members consented to. Leave out private information, such as content streaming, browser history, call logs, and what conversations they have with friends on text as it’s not relevant to their safety. The best option would be to recommend them an app to check out and install on their own, thus personally reviewing and approving the access requests.

• Select an app that only tracks the selected indicators versus collecting and storing data. While it’s not possible for medical devices and medapps that need to monitor and record vitals for at-risk patients, it’s definitely not required for general wellbeing and safety monitoring. For example, AllsWell Alert does not start tracking the phone’s GPS location till a couple of minutes before the alert is about to be sent.  

• Choose an application from a trustworthy vendor. Make sure they’re aware of data privacy and data security requirements.

AllsWell Alert App: The Number One Safety and Wellbeing Monitoring App for Your Family

AllsWell Alert App is a trustworthy safety and wellbeing monitoring app for your family members living alone, be it seniors or young adults. In addition to a regular panic button, it uses powerful phone monitoring and inactivity monitoring features that send an alert to emergency contacts even if the user cannot press the button. 

Check out all the features here, and get the first month free upon downloading for iOS or Android.