Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

This ankle bracelet isn't a fashion accessory

The product starred recently in TV's CSI: Miami.

By SHERYL KAY Times Correspondent
Published October 12, 2007

Criminal monitoring ankle bracelets have come a long way.

Not only can the mechanism indicate the location of a person using global positioning satellite technology, or GPS, it can also verify whether a person has been drinking alcohol.

The technology is so topical that the House Arrest Solution, developed by a North Tampa-based company, found itself on the season premiere of CSI: Miami.

"They really wrote the script around our product," said Kevin Thigpen, vice president of business development for Actsoft Inc., which has its headquarters at 8910 N Dale Mabry Highway.

The episode opens with the murder of a parole officer. One key suspect is eventually exonerated because the same ankle bracelet that showed the youngster had broken the law for underage drinking also showed he was in another location at the time of the murder.

The bracelet worn was Actsoft's HAS, with the company logo displayed about six times throughout the episode.

In the real world, the HAS anklet functions very much the same way, albeit more for monitoring those who violate the law than for exonerating criminals.

For years, ankle bracelets with GPS technology have been used to keep an eye on nonviolent offenders sentenced to house arrest, or other restricted travel. But there was never any way to monitor constant compliance with alcohol consumption limitations.

With the Actsoft HAS product, sensors embedded in the ankle bracelet pick up ethanol produced through the skin when anyone drinks alcohol. The information is immediately wired back to the monitoring agency.

"In the past, this person would clean himself up before meeting his probation officer," said Thigpen. "Now, with this constant monitoring, you know if someone is violating."

From the government's standpoint, the benefits are obvious-jails are overcrowded, and at an average cost of $50 a day to keep someone in prison, the $4.50 price tag for an ankle bracelet is a bargain, Thigpen said.

Offenders don't seem to mind much either, Thigpen said, because "it's an awesome alternative to incarceration."

Clients of Actsoft include state and county agencies, and jails and other offender monitoring services, such as Second Watch Monitoring Inc. of Spokane, Wash.

"On any given day we've got about 75 to 100 people wearing the HAS ankle bracelet," said Peter Black, president of Second Watch, which offers pretrial and post sentencing monitoring. "If you want to track location as well as ethanol production on a constant real-time basis, this is the bracelet."

And it's easy to use, Black said. You place a computer's cursor over the offender's name, and a real-time display pops up showing exact current location and alcohol consumption. There is no need to search a database or to run any reports to extract the data.

There's more to come, Thigpen said. The company plans to expand the applications of the technology, from monitoring the location of Alzheimer's patients, to tracking individuals quarantined with highly contagious diseases.

A future incarnation of HAS, developed with another company, will detect marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamines.

"This is always an exciting place to be working," Thigpen said.

Contact Sheryl Kay at skreporter@hotmail.com or call 813 230-8788.

Fast facts

Hard evidence

For more information on HAS, or Actsoft's other GPS-based products for asset tracking, see www.actsoft.com.

[Last modified October 11, 2007, 07:45:26]