This paper introduces WATMAS (WhatsApp-Adaptive Trip Monitoring Multi-Agent System), a proposed seven-agent software architecture for personal safety monitoring during road travel in Nigeria. Against a backdrop of 4,722 kidnapping victims recorded between July 2024 and June 2025 and 51 million active WhatsApp users representing 95% of Nigeria's online population, the system combines automated vehicle-trip detection, real-time route anomaly scoring, WhatsApp-native conversational check-ins, and graduated emergency escalation to pre-approved family contacts. The architecture is designed in compliance with the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 (NDPA). The paper includes a comparative analysis of five existing safety systems, a weighted risk-scoring formulation, a 15-question structured interview protocol, and a 10-scenario simulation plan for technical validation. This is a preprint submitted in partial fulfilment of research conducted at the Department of Information Systems, Kobe Institute of Computing, Kobe, Japan.
Mathew Adah Okwoli (2026) studied this question.