Dawn of a new parenting era: eKAVACH to monitor digital activities of your children
At a social gathering, Noopur Raghunath was discussing about today’s kids getting a lot of exposure to information through internet and their safety online. She remembers a comment that one of her close friends made: “If only we had a kid control button like a cruise control to monitor kids online, we would have paid double the price.”
That really set the ball rolling. Noopur kept on hearing stories from her friends about their children falling victim to cyber bullying, online predators and unsolicited content. There were parents who were worried about the addiction of their kids to internet, losing track of time online, isolation from friends and families etc.
In a series of further meetings, some of her friends stated that they were also anxious about the health issues and the negative effect of having internet as their integral part of existence. “During one of the discussions, it was alarming to hear that adolescents were suffering from anxiety and depression due to internet infatuation. Another concern raised was that children were becoming obese as they had no time for physical exercise or inclination to go outdoors. Being a mother myself, I was concerned over these issues as well,” says Noopur.
What was astonishing was that none of Noopur’s friends wanted to take away laptops & tablets from their kids – they wanted their children to use it for learning and fun – all they wanted was some way to make the whole experience healthy and balanced.
Think Caps
“The seed now sown, I wanted to explore ways to provide an excellent and secure online experience while making digital parenting easier and enjoyable. I quickly assembled a think tank within my family to ideate,” adds Noopur.
After back to back brainstorming sessions she arrived at a solution - eKAVACH - to disseminate beneficial tools to empower parents which could help them monitor kids without their physical presence by sending timely real time alerts and messages. “Our purpose was to strengthen mutual trust between parents and children by effective communication and insight into their children’s online world without being near their devices,” points out Noopur.
The Shield
“We wanted to select a name which is very Indian, yet reflects what we are trying to achieve. The name eKAVACH has been derived from the Sanskrit word ‘kavach’, which means a shield. Through eKAVACH, our plan is to offer a mobile electronic shield to parents to protect their children from falling prey to cyber bullying, online grooming, inappropriate web content and other forms of online security risks,” adds Noopur.
The App
It offers proactive solutions to make technology safer for kids and less threatening for parents. eKAVACH (link) comes with a unique parent application that allows parents to monitor and engage with their children remotely on real-time basis. Parents can receive instant notifications about their child’s online activity and change settings on the move help to support a child’s needs dynamically.
eKAVACH’s real-time filtering technology enables parents to block specific web categories, sites, inappropriate content, set appropriate time usage limits, limit access by days or times of day, and enable ‘safe search’ to block harmful sites from search results.
The current release, eKAVACH v1.0, focuses around internet content safety, internet time and application management. Importantly, it offers parents the ability to block/unblock specific categories of websites and define internet usage time for each day of week.
Meanwhile, upcoming releases in eKAVACH v2.0 will include social media monitoring, IM & chat room monitoring, cyber bullying protection, phone call/SMS and phone media monitoring while its v3.0 version will include location-based services for physical security of children.
App link: eKAVACH
