STE Elephant Tracker screenshotAn elephant tracking collarElephant Tracker launcher icon

Save the Elephants Elephant Tracker Apps

The Project

In several locations in Africa, Save The Elephants operates a tracking system which uses GPS radio collars to monitor the movements of wild elephants in near real time. The tracking data is available to desktop computers using Google Earth. As part of a Google Tides Foundation grant sponsored by Google Earth Outreach, Solertium worked with Save The Elephants to create lightweight iOS and Android mobile apps that can show the current location of the elephants on low-bandwidth, weak 3G connections. The closely secured enterprise mobile apps are available only to the wildlife managers in the field charged with protecting the elephants. The app also can push alerts, such as the most concerning notification that a transponder has stopped moving, which frequently means an elephant has been shot by poachers. With this information, responders can move quickly to the right spot, potentially catching the criminals in the act and help any wounded elephants.

The Work

The cross-platform apps are developed using Appcelerator Titanium Mobile SDK. KML data is parsed and extracted using a Node.js service hosted on Heroku and distributed to the app via JSON over an SSL-secured channel.

The Partners

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Gemma Francis, Jake Wall, Rob Heittman, Alison Heittman, Save the Elephants, Tides Foundation, Google Earth Outreach, Solertium

Insight