Location tracking -- for people, products, places -- is fast coming into its own It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your _______ is?
By Andrew Caffrey, Globe Staff | October 10, 2005
In one operating room at Massachusetts General Hospital, doctors and nurses wear radio tags that register their comings and goings on a
42-inch television screen so other members of the medical team know who is attending the surgery at any given moment.At an old-soldiers home in King, Wis., elderly residents who are at risk of wandering off carry a small wireless beacon that signals their location within a residential facility, and triggers an audio alert over the public address system when one gets close to a potentially risky area, such as a stairwell.
At the Illinois Institute of Technology, prospective students could take a self-guided tour using a tablet PC that spits out information on activities happening near where they are standing on the Chicago campus or gives them architectural highlights of the Mies van der Rohe building as they walk by.
Such tracking technologies, including new applications for Global Positioning Systems, are coming to a campus, cafe, or care center near you.
After years of false starts and underwhelming results, systems for locating people, places, and objects are finally finding themselves. Once the province of the fanciful imagination of Q from the James Bond series, location technologies are wending their way into ordinary business practices and extraordinary human applications, from monitoring the elderly to connecting a cardiac patient admitted to the emergency room with the nearest surgeon.
The advances are being aided by upgrades in hand-held and other mobile devices, which can now process prodigious amounts of data generated by navigation and related technologies. Communications networks are more robust and can provide more saturated coverage, and the costs of chip sets for GPS and other tracking technologies have fallen steeply.
Indeed, consumers are now so accepting of mobile devices such as cellphones that industry analysts predict they won't be reluctant to adopt this next wave of newfangled technologies.