The alarming sexting trend among young people has prompted the Legacy Technology Group to create a new app that allows parents to monitor their children's smartphones.

The group's founder Damon Davis said sexting - the texting of sexually explicit or graphic content - had become a dangerous phenomenon and a growing one after a recent FBI study revealed that one in five teenagers in the US with online access had sent or exchanged nude photos of themselves.

The material can end up being exchanged with others and posted on adult-orientated websites, with devastating consequences for the original sender.

Davis said parents needed to be aware of what their children were doing and how vulnerable they are to online predators and even their peers.

The Smart Shepherd app has been created with that in mind and allows parents to remotely monitor and control their children's online activity.

Parents can download the app onto their smartphones and use it to remotely monitor real-time activity on their children's phones, including incoming and outgoing calls, text messages, emails, social media activity, pictures and videos viewed, and all internet activity.

Smart Shepherd also provides a panic button that can be installed on the child's phone and used to automatically send a text notifying the parents of an emergency situation. The feature also provides a map to the child's location while simultaneously taking photos of the area and uploading them to the parent's portal.

"Entire lives of these children are playing out on these little phones that parents know little about," said Davis. "Who they like, who likes them, a first kiss, and unfortunately worse things like pictures of body parts, cyberbullying and stuff quite candidly that every parent would want to know about, and stop."