Tether

College students face a large social and academic challenge when they are freshmen, causing their attention span to shorten and thus lose their belongings frequently. Our product, Tether, provides a unique solution for this customer segment by notifying users in real-time, alerting students while a valuable is being lost/stolen. Tether is a minimalist, low-cost personal tracking device that uses a Bluetooth connection to prevent consumers from losing their belongings.

Tether operates through a specific iterative process: If a user’s phone is separated by more than roughly 10 meters from the device, the Tether app will send the user a notification alerting them that they have left the device behind. Tether will then also record the GPS location at which the connection was lost so that the user can recover the lost item quickly after. Unlike many competitors, Tether notifies users to reclaim their items while they are being lost rather than after the item is hundreds of meters away. We view Tether as a simple, genuine solution to prevent students from losing valuable belongings, providing relief to an agitating issue.