Automating baby assistance requests in Android via Tasker
Have you ever wanted to automatically signal your loved one you need help unloading the baby, groceries, or just that you’re home? I wrote about this scenario for my other blogging gig, but I felt it ought to be promoted over here as, well, I don’t think most of the baby crowd is going to be reading my other site and my writings on Tasker.
The problem:
Your loved one gets home and potentially needs help with unloading the baby most workdays, but signalling that they’re home may be difficult due to having a screaming infant in the vehicle. It’s also yet another thing that distracts the driver from their driving while they have to deal with making the phone call to you, and the average time to make a phone call and say one word to the other person is in the 40 second range.
Due to work, traffic, stops for gas, food, you may not really have a good idea when your significant other is going to be back with your baby, groceries, whips and chains, etc.
The solution:
Using a fairly inexpensive application called Tasker, create a task that automatically informs the person at home via text message when the vehicle containing baby is approaching your home.
Tasker is currently $2.99 from Google Play, and may be a little more than what most people think they need since it’s an entire context-driven tasking engine, but I’ll be writing about it in the future, and $3 to make sure a loved one doesn’t die attempting to call to get your lazy ass out to help unload things is $3 well spent.
In detail: I wrote about the Tasker creation I created at Pocketables, so I’m directing you there to read the details of the solution I initially wrote rather than reposting the content here. I’ll probably end up doing this from time to time as my varying interest intersect, but in this case I wrote it for them, and they have nothing to do with theITbaby so I’d feel like I was cheating on ’em if I reposted it here.
The short of it is the solution checks to see if they’re on the home cell phone tower, makes sure it’s the right day of week time of day since you’re only interested when they get back, and tosses you a notification when they enter the tower area.
You can add more triggers and events such as if the area the car is parked is in range of a named WiFi access point to toss you a text letting you know the person is parked. Actually with enough ingenuity you can do pretty much anything.
