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Have you ever stood by the Baggage Claim Carousel after a long flight and wondered if your bag would actually ever show up?
When Benedict, Betina, and Sonia entered the Design Innovation 190 classroom at UC Berkeley, there was one thing that unified them: they loved to travel. Benedict was an exchange student from Singapore, Betina an international student from Turkey, and Sonia had studied Middle School in India. However as much as they loved exploring new places, they had all dealt with the hassle of micromanaging luggage and in some cases, losing it entirely. They conducted user research by interviewing many different people from frequent business travelers to students who had only been abroad a handful of times and using this survey to collect anonymous responses.
Their solution was 2LOC.
After creating our product suite, we decided that we actually wanted to narrow down our focus as we felt that we had strayed away from the heart of our problem. We wanted to help people keep a track of their luggage specifically. This is when we finalized 2LOC.
2LOC secures your luggage and tracks its location so you will always know where your bag is anytime, anywhere. It instantly reports when your luggage goes missing, so that you can travel without the fear of losing your bag or having to wait days to get back your bag. 2LOC uses an inbuilt GPS to provide real time location data, displayed on our proprietary app. Before the plane takes off, simply set the 2LOC app to travel mode, which will check on the status of your bag. If your baggage is not on the plane, the app will automatically report the lost luggage to the airport, allowing an immediate response from the airport, way before you reach your destination.
2LOC’s battery last up to a month and can be charged using any USB-C cable. To make it easier and safer for you, we’ve enabled bluetooth unlock through any smartphone, and an additional backup key in the extremely small chance the lock runs out of battery. To make sure that this is foolproof, we have included a TSA key to ensure that airlines won’t cut your lock and that your valuables are safe 24/7.
We allow our users to connect their 2LOCs to their smartphones using our Application Interface detailed below. You can check out the interaction flow at our Figma prototype here.
How it Works
2LOC combines a GPS tracker with an electronic lock and a bluetooth connection to your phone. The 2LOC tracks the location of your luggage in real time, streaming the coordinates over bluetooth to the connected phone at a configurable interval. When the luggage is out of bluetooth range, the 2LOC drops the bluetooth connection, stops streaming the coordinates and instead records them on the device. When the bluetooth connection has been re-established, the stored coordinates are pushed to the connected smartphone.
Now you can tell not only where your luggage is, but where it has been when it is out of your sight, and range. 2LOC is powered by a a USB-C rechargeable battery, but can last up to a month on a single charge. Battery power is conserved by smart power management turning off the GPS and bluetooth when the vehicle that the luggage is in starts moving and surpasses a certain speed as recorded by the accelerometer.
Narrow Band - IoT (CATM1/NBIOT) is just becoming available globally as of December 2018. Once NBIOT is ubiquitous we will expand the product line by creating 2LOC2.0 replacing both the tracker and the bluetooth with an NBIOT module that will not only track the device but also be able to communicate over much larger ranges than bluetooth, all at data rates that are sufficient for this purpose. There is no monthly fee for 2LOC, expect that for 2LOC2.0 there will be a small monthly fee for NBIOT.
