Praying Peacefully in Mosques: No More Ringing Mobile Phones

Long time ago when mobile phones weren’t so common to the general Saudi public, there was a man who once said that the sound of music will enter the mosques one day. At the time, he was laughed at for thinking of something inconceivable at the time. But now, we hardly pray in a mosque without being disturbed by the ringing of the mobile phones. A simple solution would be to place a reminder poster outside the mosque’s door. This does solve the problem partially as there are always people who will either tend not see it or forget to act on it. Another solution, though a costly one, is to shield EM signals from entering Mosques using Faraday cage. Signal jammers could also be used, though these are considered illegal in many countries. With this in mind, we in this team bent to come up with a solution to this nagging problem that will almost eliminate it. The main idea of this solution is to have a device which sends signals to make mobile phones that enter certain places, e.g. a mosque, automatically switch to silent mode for as long as they are in the area. As the majority of modern mobile phones in the market come equipped with Bluetooth technology, our device will make use of that technology to help in silencing the mobile phones. Of course, an issue at hand is what if a person entering the mosque is using a mobile that has no built-in Bluetooth. This, a rare case, has yet to be resolved. To help make the solution autonomous, we will develop a client mobile application that will automatically handle the device’s signals. The mobile’s Bluetooth might not be On so the application will ensure the Bluetooth is forcibly turned on during prayer time. Other possible applications for this project include making mobile phones that enter a hospital or an airplane change to offline (flight) mode to avoid interfering with its devices, however it will have to be implemented in a way that avoids letting the device itself cause interference to said critical devices. In the design phase we discussed the different ways the device will behave and how the client program will handle the device’s signals. We favored using a dual directional antenna system. In the implementation phase, which is ongoing, we are confronting some challenges. It is not possible to come up with a universal client application that will control the Bluetooth. For example, there are five different editions of Symbian S60 with multiple releases per edition. Unfortunately these are incompatible. The same is true for other mobile OS. Also, we are looking into ways to automatically turn the Bluetooth On without seeking the approval of the owner of the mobile phone. The nature of our application requires software certificates. The certificates are expensive and available only to commercial entity. The project is still ongoing and may go through further changes before the final implementatio