Doron’s Story -The Foundation of AngelSense

December 3, 2014

My name is Doron, founder of AngelSense and the father of Itamar, a 17-year-old teenager with Autism, who is sweet and naive like a little child – an eternal child. The idea for AngelSense came from the deep worry for Itamar, since he is so vulnerable and cannot share what he goes through.

I have a technological background in analytics and sensor processing so I was disappointed to find out that there are no effective solutions that allow me, as a parent, to monitor what is happening with my child while not under my care. About two years ago, I decided to take action. I left my job and together with my friend Nery, we decided to create AngelSense.

I’d like to share one example from many in which I was able to keep Itamar safe and well cared-for with the help of AngelSense.

This year, we had a new driver for Itamar’s school bus. The driver seemed a bit aggressive, but the previous driver couldn’t handle our son so we agreed to have this driver as we had AngelSense to help us identify any issues in the bus ride. AngelSense sends us text notifications when Itamar arrives at school and leaves it, reports every bus stop, the bus route is visualized on a map and using Google street view pictures and we can use the Listen-In feature. We have all the tools we need to make sure Itamar is safe and well cared for on the bus.

We monitored the bus ride closely using AngelSense. The bus route, speed, and stops seemed normal. Itamar was also very quiet but we assumed he had relaxed during the ride while playing on his iPad. After being out on sick leave, the driver returned to work and things quickly went downhill. Itamar became nervous and started to self-injure. We were very concerned but as school staff had recently some changes due to the summer program, we attributed Itamar’s behavior to that.

We started using Listen-In during his ride to school more carefully, especially the boarding time. The system alerts us when Itamar left school so we knew when exactly to start listening. What we heard was shocking to us. The driver was yelling at Itamar, as he was entering the bus: “Shut up! Put your earphones on and don’t speak!”. We were horrified. This is why Itamar was not communicating during the entire ride to school!

Immediately, I called the bus service and told them that from now on I would be driving Itamar until they found another driver. They insisted that the driver was ok, but this time – being empowered with real information and facts – I knew what was going on and was able to be very assertive. In the past, I would only have had my suspicions but in this case, I knew exactly what was going on. We got the new driver and Itamar was immediately better – it was simply amazing! Now, he runs to the bus every morning, happy again to be going to school.

Creating a safer world for children with special needs is a life mission for us. Our goal is to help protect and improve the care for children with special needs, while bringing peace of mind to their families. We developed a GPS and voice monitoring solution with smart analytics to provide parents of children with special needs continuous visibility of their children to help identify and prevent cases of wandering, mistreatment and abuse.

AngelSense also strives to enable parents from within the community – many of whom have left their full time jobs to take care of their kids – to return to the workforce by building a distributed support service, allowing them to work part time from their homes. AngelSense customer service is staffed with such parents, all of whom are expert users of AngelSense and the perfect people to support other parents.

Our special children cannot always effectively share what they go through. They need our protection – and we need technology to assist us. The AngelSense solution helps us understand and monitor their daily schedule and how they are being treated to make sure they are safe and well cared-for.

I invite you to check out the AngelSense solution with your child, and share your feedback with me.