Activity-Based Safety App for Student Visibility and Emergency Response
Education - Australia Client - Mobile App Development – Crossed Platform - 6 months – 3 Engineers
The client needed to create a more reliable way for schools, students, and assigned guardians to stay connected during safety related activities. Newwave Solutions helped the client turn a student safety concept into a release-ready dual-app system by replacing always-on tracking with controlled activity sessions. This decision gave guardians the visibility they needed during safety-related activities, while preserving student control, reducing background tracking risks, and creating a clearer product proposition for schools.
Client Context
The client is an Australia-based education business developing digital solutions to improve student safety and guardian communication.
Their product serves schools, students, and assigned guardians who need a more reliable way to stay connected during daily school-related activities, outdoor learning programs, and situations where student visibility is critical.
Not just a simple communication tool; they required a safety product that had to earn trust from three sides at once: schools that needed operational confidence, guardians who needed timely context, and students who should not feel continuously monitored.
Their Business Stakes
The real challenge was not simply replacing manual updates with location tracking. The client needed to design a safety product that could earn trust from three sides at once: schools, guardians, and students. Schools needed a solution they could confidently introduce into safety-sensitive activities. Guardians needed timely context to understand whether a student was safe or needed support. Students, however, should not feel that safety meant being continuously monitored.
The client had limited ability to offer a differentiated digital safety product with real-time visibility.
Always-on tracking could create privacy concerns, battery drain, and lower trust from students, guardians, or schools.
If the product limited visibility too much, guardians might not have enough information to assess what was happening during safety-sensitive moments.
If the user flow was too complex, early users could struggle to adopt the product, reducing launch effectiveness.
A weak alert flow could make the product less suitable for safety-sensitive school activities.
Poor synchronization could create scaling bottlenecks as the product expanded to more students, guardians, and school-related activities.
Our Approach
The client needed guardians to have timely visibility during safety-related activities, while students still retained control over when their information was shared. Schools also needed a product that could support safety without creating concerns around continuous surveillance.
Instead of choosing always-on tracking, which could increase privacy concerns, battery usage, and adoption risk, Newwave Solutions designed the system around controlled activity sessions.
In this model, visibility is activated only when a student starts a defined activity. Location sharing, guardian access, activity status, cancellation, and distress signals are all tied to that activity context. The Student App and Buddy Board App also share the same activity logic, helping both sides follow the same status during active sessions.
Key Engineering Decision
The most important engineering decision in this project was to avoid treating the product as a continuous tracking app. Newwave Solutions designed the system around activity-based visibility. Location sharing, guardian access, activity status, cancellation, and distress signals were all tied to controlled activity sessions.
Activity-based background tracking
Instead of collecting location data continuously, the system activated visibility only when a student started a defined activity. This reduced unnecessary tracking, limited privacy concerns, and helped position the product as a controlled safety tool rather than a surveillance app.
Shared activity state logic
The Student App and Buddy Board App had to reflect the same activity status (active tracking, cancellation, distress signals). A shared logic helped reduce confusion in safety-sensitive situations and ensured both sides acted on the same context.
Flutter
Flutter was selected because one shared codebase could support both iOS and Android, reducing duplicated development effort, lowering staffing cost, and shortening time to market.
.NET with ABP.io
ABP.io was chosen because its prebuilt modules and predefined architecture helped the team avoid rebuilding common backend components from scratch, while still allowing customization for user roles, activity sessions, relationship permissions, and access control.
VM-based hosting
VM-based hosting was selected to keep deployment cost practical during the release stage, while still supporting the client’s need to validate the product before investing in a more advanced scaling setup.
Newwave Solutions delivered the project through a project-based Agile/Scrum model with a compact 3-member team across development and project management.
Because the project followed a fixed-price model, collaboration had to protect delivery scope while still allowing the client to validate key safety flows early. The team used Jira to manage the shared backlog, track priorities, and separate launch-critical requirements from future enhancement ideas. Git was used to keep source code changes traceable throughout development.
Weekly progress updates and milestone reviews focused on the product’s most important trust-related workflows: activity start, guardian visibility, cancellation, distress signals, and activity status synchronization between the Student App and Buddy Board App.
Risk Handling
During development, one of the key risks came from background location tracking. The app needed to keep guardians updated while a student activity was active, but continuous location updates could create battery drain, unstable performance, or inconsistent tracking behavior across mobile operating systems. If not handled carefully, this could affect release readiness and weaken trust in the Buddy Board monitoring experience.
Newwave Solutions addressed this by moving away from always-on tracking and designing location updates around controlled activity sessions. The team adjusted tracking frequency, aligned updates with activity status, and tested key scenarios such as active sessions, cancellation, and unstable connectivity. This helped maintain near real-time visibility while keeping the app more stable, battery-conscious, and ready for handover.
Product Outcome
Students did not need to share location continuously. Visibility was activated only within defined activity sessions, helping reduce privacy concerns while still supporting safety-related monitoring when needed.
Buddy Board users could view activity details, activity status, and near real-time location updates during active sessions. This gave guardians more context to assess what was happening and respond appropriately instead of relying on fragmented manual updates.
Activity visibility was limited to assigned Buddy Board users through trusted relationships. This helped the product fit the expectations of an education environment, where safety visibility must be controlled, permission-based, and easy to explain to schools and guardians.
The Student App and Buddy Board App operated on the same activity logic. When a student started, cancelled, or triggered a distress signal within an activity, both sides could follow the same status context, reducing confusion and synchronization risk.
The product supported all signals as connected safety workflows. This gave the client a more complete safety solution instead of a basic location-tracking feature.
With roles, trusted relationships, activity records, and access control already structured in the system, the client gained a foundation that could support additional school-related safety scenarios after launch.
Business Impacts
Newwave Solutions helped the client turn a student safety concept into a release-ready product with a stronger go-to-market position. Instead of entering the market as another tracking app, the client could position the solution as a controlled safety visibility platform for school-related activities.
The activity-based model made the product easier to explain to schools, guardians, and students because visibility was tied to context, permission, and action. Guardians gained the information needed to respond during active sessions, while students retained control over when their activity information was shared.
Beyond launch, the system gave the client a reusable foundation for future safety scenarios. With roles, trusted relationships, activity records, and access control already structured, the product can expand into additional school trips, outdoor learning activities, and emergency response workflows without rebuilding its core trust model.
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