Location tracking -- for people, products, places -- is fast coming into its own / It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your _______ is?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Date: October 11, 2005 2:07:54 PM EDT
To: undisclosed-recipient:;
Subject: Location tracking -- for people, products, places -- is fast  
coming into its own / It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your _______  
is?



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.

...

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/10/10/ 
location_tracking____for_people_products_places____is_fast_coming_into_i 
ts_own/



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