George Lu 1 and Austin Amakye Ansah 2, 1 USA, 2 California State Polytechnic University, USA

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 paper 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 [7]. 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 [8]. 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.

Screen time, Parental controls, Flutter, Firebase