Development of a Hand-Held Device for Women Assault Reporting

The issue of insecurity is a major concern for women and society. The World Health Organisation's statistics show that about one in three women worldwide experience physical or sexual violence in their intimate or non-partner relationships. This is a disturbing figure. Various crimes against women such as physical violence, kidnapping, rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment occur at different places at any given time of the day, especially in isolated places and mostly during late hours. These crimes contribute to the local and global crime indexes, as evidenced by the increasing criminality score. Governments have tried to address these security challenges by implementing stricter laws, but crime rates remain high. Unfortunately, related works exist but are limited as they lack critical features such as a secured and exclusive fingerprint verification for users, a subsystem to prevent a potentially detrimental false alarm from occurring, and an effective alerting mechanism to alert relatives. To overcome these shortcomings, this research proposes a hand-held device for women assault reporting that incorporates: a secured fingerprint verification subsystem, a vibration-based alert subsystem for prompting the user to prevent false alarms, an emergency text along with a phone call established to the predefined contacts as a more urgent alert mechanism, and a built-in microphone feature for environmental audio surveillance established via phone call connection. The system's response time was an average of 4 seconds, the False Acceptance Rate (FAR) was 6%, and the False Rejection Rate (FRR) was 5%. These promising results indicate that the system can effectively reduce crime against women, improve the sense of safety in women anywhere they go, and mitigate the overall crime rate.