A team of researchers at East Carolina University (ECU) in Greenville, N.C., is testing several technologies for their possible use in creating a network of personal alert devices to help keep students safe.

Last year, two University of North Carolina (UNC)-Wilmington students were murdered. Now, Barry DuVall and his staff at ECU's Center for Wireless and Mobile Computing spend their days building portable safety alert systems on trash cans, mounting wired poles in the yard, and testing cell phones with panic buttons.

Their mission: Find a way to make personal alert devices work on North Carolina's college campuses.

Some of the technology they work with has been on the market for a decade. Some is still in the lab.

But DuVall wants some sort of device in the hands of students and staff at the 16-campus UNC system--and he wants it there now.

"I think there's a tendency to put off worrying about things like personal safety and sort of assume it will go away or we won't have to take it too seriously," he said recently. "But when we read every day, things like a student shot at a high school here last week, things like that are happening all around us."

DuVall hopes UNC system officials soon will endorse a proposal to create a network of alert devices that will function not only on UNC campuses, but also off-campus and at the state's private colleges and universities.

Jessica Lee Faulkner, 19, and Christen Marie Naujoks, 22, were the UNC-Wilmington students who died a month apart last year.