Airports around the world have an epidemic. People are losing valuable items every time they go through the security checkpoint(s) at airports. This is because one of the requirements of airport security is that travelers must remove their laptops from their bags. Another requirement is that travelers remove phones and other metallic objects from their persons before passing through the scanners. As a consequence, there is a natural tendency for travelers to walk away without collecting their items (including, without limitation, laptops, smart phones, tablet computers, cellular phones, media players, and/or the like). Approximately 1.7 million people travel through U.S. airports each day. Items are lost everywhere in the airports, including, but not limited to, on planes, in terminal gates, in lounges, and/or the like. It is estimated that over 16,000 laptops are left at U.S. airports each year. The laptop loss alone is estimated to be around $700 million.
Travelers' items left in airports also put a significant strain on the already over-worked security personnel such as Transportation Security Administration (“TSA”) personnel in the U.S. It requires that such personnel retain and manage custody of such lost items. Currently, such lost items are collected by TSA agents and held for 30 days. After the 30-day period expires, the hard drives and/or memory are removed and the items are put on auction. All the information in the computing devices is subsequently destroyed. This process requires man-hours for collecting the lost items, tracking how long the lost items have been held, removing data storage drives, destroying information stored in the devices, and auctioning the items.
Third party non-governmental Lost and Found web sites have been established in an effort to help people recover their lost items. It is unclear, however, how successful these sites are. But, for such sites to be useful, the travelers would have to know about a particular site in order to be able to post that they have lost something at a particular airport. It would also require that the person who has possession of the lost item(s) know about the site so that they can contact the person that lost such item(s). In general, such web sites only serve to work on the recovery of lost items, but cannot help to prevent loss of the items in the first place.
In terms of the use of weight measurement of luggage, existing travel scales provide weighing functionality, but such devices are incapable of alerting a traveler of a change in weight (such as when an item has not been put back in the luggage, or the like).
Hence, there is a need for more robust and scalable solutions for preventing item and luggage loss.