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Jason Jenkins/CNET
LG’s child-tracking wearable is expanding beyond its South Korean birthplace, now giving European parents the chance to remotely track their childrens’ movements.
The Kizon is a simple, colourful strap that you attach to your child’s wrist. Inside the gadget there’s a 2G SIM-card that can handle GPS, while an app on the parents’ phone lets you request its location, showing you where the tracking gadget is on a map.
The Kizon itself has only one button — a big phone button that places a call to the parent’s mobile. Once connected, your child can hear your voice through the Kizon’s on-board speakers, and respond by talking to the watch, Dick Tracey-style.
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The battery lasts 36 hours, with a notification sent to the parent’s phone when power reserves dip below 20 percent. A feature called Location Reminder also lets you pre-program the Kizon to give you location alerts at specific times of the day — handy if you want to check your kid made it home safely from school, for instance.
Revealed earlier this year, Kizon has thus far only been available on LG’s home turf of South Korea. The tech giant has said that Kizon is going on sale in Poland this week, with other European countries to follow. US, UK and Australian availability and pricing has yet to be announced.
If your kids aren’t old enough to use a proper phone but you still want a way of keeping in touch with them when they’re out and about, Kizon could be a sensible solution — but as the BBC and The Guardian have noted, the gadget has sparked debate over the extent to which parents should be using new technology to monitor their children.
When LG first unveiled Kizon in July, one CNET commenter dubbed it “helicopter parenting taken to the next level”.
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