LOST & RECOVERY ITEM SYSTEM (LRIS): A Digital Platform for Efficient Item Recovery

Imagine how difficult it was to recover a lost wallet or mobile phone just a few years ago. You would walk around retracing your steps, check with multiple security offices, post on community notice boards, or simply hope that someone honest would find your belongings and find a way to contact you. These old-fashioned techniques, though somewhat effective then, no longer do the trick in today’s fast-paced world. The current consumers and citizens have learned to expect to grab their phones and resolve their problems within minutes, be it reporting a lost backpack or checking if someone has found their misplaced ID card. In this paper, we have guided the readers on our ideas towards creating a digital lost and recovery item system workflow, how we constructed it and tested it, and how it can be of value to both individuals who lose items and those who find them. The platform allows users to report lost belongings, report found items, search for matching records, and communicate about item recovery through a mobile application whose design is clean and full of intuitive functionalities. Our features included user authentication, categorized item reporting, location-based search, image uploads, claim request mechanisms, and notification systems. The most important contributions here have been the creation of an adaptable architecture to support lost and found item matching, ensuring the interface performs excellently on both Android and iOS devices, and actually analyzing the question of whether the platform is working by getting feedback on user reactions. What we discovered was fairly promising—users were recovering items faster, institutions reported better management of lost property, and a strong sense of community responsibility was formed. The claim verification system proved to be a win-win as legitimate owners can recover their items when they need them and finders receive a reliable way to return belongings. This study contributes to the existing information about digital recovery platforms and provides a piece of practical guidance to anyone developing such a type of location-based item recovery system.