      Abstract In the present day world people frequently use what can be called temporal alarms i.e. time based alarms like ‘Give me a wake up call at 8:00 AM tomorrow’. These temporal alarms can be set on a variety of devices like clocks, PCs, mobile devices etc. Among all these, mobile devices have this additional feature that they are carried along by the person i.e. can move in a 2D coordinate system. With the advent of location tracking systems like GPS, mobile devices can locate their position in the coordinate system. So with a GPS enabled mobile device we can extend the idea of temporal alarms to space – there by introducing the concept of spatial alarms. To set a spatial alarm one would have to designate an area on the 2D coordinate system as a trigger area. When the mobile device enters the marked area the alarm would go off letting the user know that the spatial condition has been satisfied. This has several applications. Some of the obvious uses include applications like (a) ‘Remind me when I am near place x to pick up stuff from y’ (b) ‘Remind me not to go anywhere close to place x’ (c) ‘Let me know if my friend x is within a mile of my current location’ etc. In this project we intend to focus on static spatial alarms i.e. alarms on fixed areas on the map. The focus of this project is on implementing a simple prototype system to demonstrate the viability of the idea. This document is to serve as the project proposal. Motivation All of us frequently use what can be called temporal alarms. Often we set wake up alarms and have the device (Clock, PC, mobile phone, PDA etc) notify that the time is up. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a device remind us when we are within a particular area in the map? Such a system could be very beneficial. Several applications can be built on top of such a spatial alarm. To help demonstrate the usefulness – here are a few examples: 1. Spatial reminders: Assume that a person looked up a website like Craiglist and realized that a person at Marietta (a place near Atlanta) is selling furniture (something of interest). However the person would want not be interested in driving all the way to Marietta to check out the furniture. Instead he/she would want to be reminded the next time he/she drives within 1 mile of Marietta. As of now such a problem cannot be solved using temporal alarms simply because the user would not be able to exactly identify when he/she would be at that location. 2. Rendezvous: Another application could be in combination with social networking tools like orkut. Imagine you are in an airport and waiting for a flight. Also imagine that one of your friends is also in the same airport waiting for another flight. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a system that could identify this and notify you 2, so that you catch up while you wait? Spatial alarms could be used for such purposes. All that one has to do is set a spatial alarm on the location of his/her friends (with their permission) and the moment the interested parties are within the trigger range (say 1 mile) they will be notified.3. Spatial warning systems: Imagine facilities with specific areas marked as unsafe. As of now people use sign boards and barriers to make sure others know not to venture into the area. With spatial alarms this can be made even more effective. All that one has to do is install a spatial alarm on all those areas where he/she is to stay away from. Venturing into any of the areas by mistake will trigger of the alarm and he/she will be warned to stay away. 4. Inventory tracking: As of today, RFID and related technologies are used to efficiently use just in time inventory. We can also add another dimension to this by tracking the inventory movements by setting spatial alarms. For e.g., when the product reaches intended destination, the inventory management process can use this information to request for new resources and/ or optimize the current production queue. Even though RFID tags are cheap the RFID antennae are very expensive making this approach a lot more lucrative compared to RFIDs thought it is just an approximation. There are innumerable numbers of applications possible with such a framework. Objective: In this project we hope to build a prototype system to show the viability of the idea. As a prototype we intend to implement a system with static spatial alarms. Related Work Spatial alarms are nothing but a specific case of Continuous Queries like those previously studied in literature like in MobiEyes [3]. The ideas in MobiEyes [3] describe how to achieve this on a generic query basis. In this case the trigger condition is always the same – ‘the mobile device entering the area of interest’. Though this is a special case it has special significance because a lot of applications can benefit out of this. In fact if this is offered as part of the mobile device platform framework application developers can come up with several useful applications like the one discussed in the motivation section. This idea also throws open several interesting research problems. One of them is as discussed in the last section. Though several research/articles efforts have talked of similar ideas we are not familiar with any software systems which are actually available for this task. Proposed Work User InterfaceWith regards to our estimation so far the following would be the resources required: 1. Mobile device/Emulator 2. GPS/Virtual GPS 3. Map service 4. Server to keep track of spatial alarms System Overview To start off the user would be able to see the map of the area and move around to focus on the desired one. The maps would be fetched from a map service like Microsoft MapPoint. The map would be displayed as shown in the figure above. The user then would mark the area where he/she would want to set the spatial alarm. Once the alarm is set the program would constantly check with the GPS if the spatial coordinates of the trigger area have