Recently, JWT China developed, in coordination with the association Baby Back Home, an app meant to help parents find their kidnapped or lost children.
Source: http://mdelmas.net/
Each year 20.000 kids are abducted in China. They are sold into slave labor and prostitution, or end up begging in the streets. In a huge country like China with over 1.4 billion people it is nearly impossible to find all these missing children.
To help, the association Baby Back Home started a campaign which is quiet amazing. First, they placed sculptures of parents with despaired and sad expressions in public places. Between the mother and the father is a space with the form of a missing child.
Through augmented reality people can see the missing child and listen to his history with their smartphones.
In addition, the app enables every person who has a smartphone and wants to help, to take pictures of children they suspect lost or stolen. The app uses face recognition technology and compares the taken picture to Baby Back Home’s missing persons database to see if there is a match. If yes, a notification is immediately sent to the parents.
I think this app has a big potential and could be extended to other nations in order to fight against kidnapping. In one week the application has been downloaded more than 20.000 times.