Mafqodat: A Secure and Safe Mobile Application to Retrieve Lost Items in Educational Institutes

With the advancement of mobile and cellular communication technology, many safety and security applications have been designed and implemented. These mobile applications can enable efficient communication between users and provide automated way to track news, events and announcements. Thus, a strong community support mechanism can be established using these mobile applications. The focus of this work is to provide an efficient solution to manage the lost and found items in educational institutes. The loss of personal belongings from students and faculty members is a major issue in universities. While there are mechanisms such as social media postings and physical announcements to manage it, design of mobile application can efficiently solve this issue. In this paper, a novel mobile application based solution is presented to address this challenge. The goal of the developed application is to help students and faculty in King Saud University campus to save time and effort in recovering their lost items by providing an application that acts as a platform for Lost and Found items. Users who find lost items can return the items to their owners after verifying their ownership or if they were guests and visitors in the university, they can deliver them at Security staff. The application provides communication between owners and finders, and it also has safety measures to ensure that lost items are returned to their original owner. Another key feature of the developed application is that posts have a radius range notification from the location of where the post was made.