KeepTab

The Project

Platforms like Roblox have intensified parental concerns regarding screen time and safety, yet existing monitoring solutions only focus on web monitoring or mobile only approaches. This project introduces KeepTab, a parental control system designed to provide seamless, real-time monitoring and control across desktop and mobile devices. The system leverages a three-tier architecture, utilizing Flutter for the cross-platform client applications and Google Firebase for backend services, including data persistence, real-time messaging, and authentication. Desktop clients employ platform-specific utilities (WMI on Windows, ps on Unix-based systems) for low-latency process detection, enabling the monitoring of specific applications. Parental control is facilitated through a mobile interface that issues asynchronous commands via Cloud Firestore, allowing for remote process termination. Performance benchmarks validate the system's efficiency, with the optimized process detection method (tasklist) demonstrating an average latency of 187 ms, and local command execution achieving a mean response time of 5.90 ms. These results confirm that KeepTab provides a responsive, reliable, and scalable framework for modern screen time management. This project was inspired by the environment around me. Seeing that many of my fellow peers at school are unhealthily addicted to online games, taking away from their personal, social, and academic life, I wanted to build a convenient and accessible solution to this problem. In short, the hardest part of getting this project published was setting up the crosslink system between devices so that it would trigger in realtime, and getting the app to not bypass the terms of service for our app's compatible devices such as Mac, Windows, and IOS.

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