Mobile location trackers boost safety, security

Marshall Towe, Contributor, Jakarta

The situation could have been a tragedy. On Feb. 27, 2003, police officer Mike Privitt's pickup spun off an icy road in Tarrant County, Texas. Dazed, confused and trapped alone in an overturned vehicle, the temperature was dropping below freezing.

In a situation in which timing was critical, rescuers managed to find him just minutes after he called 911 on his cell phone -- even though, he personally, was unaware of his location.

A continent away, it could have been the worst day in the life of a jewelry shop employee. In Tokyo, Japan, on the morning of Nov. 27, 2002, a bag of jewelry valued at US$1 million in the employee's care was stolen from the luggage rack of the downtown train he was taking. According to Fuji TV's Super News, just one hour after the robbery, the police had tracked down the bag to a location 12 kilometers away from the train and recovered it - contents intact.

Great work from emergency services in both cases - but in both cases they had a little help. This came in the form of an eye in the sky: the wireless position location system. It can use the handset to pinpoint a person or object's location on the ground to within fifty to one hundred and fifty meters.

Originally designed for military use, this internationally deployed location finding system is based on a network of 24 satellites orbiting the earth, and their ground stations. Global Positioning System (GPS) technology allows users to triangulate between multiple GPS satellites to pinpoint locations, and has long been used by logistics companies to track the progress of cargo shipments across the world.

Personal use, however, is only just gaining ground. GPS technology was embedded in the cell phone that saved Officer Privitt by transmitting his position to rescuers during his 911 call.

As people calling emergency services are often panicked, injured or otherwise incoherent, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, stipulated in 1996 that (subject to certain conditions and schedules) all American mobile service providers must provide the emergency location of cellular phone users for wireless 911 calls. The FCC requirement for this handset-based location solution is for accuracy within 50 meters, 67 percent of the time, and within 150 meters 95 percent of the time. This means that users involved in an emergency situation -- or the victim of a crime who calls 911 from a cell phone -- can be assured that emergency services will be informed of his or her position.

To really be effective, location solutions have to function across all environments, including those that are highly blocked, such as dense urban or indoor locations, and in thick foliage. California-based QUALCOMM, the developer of chipsets that power the most advanced mobile phones, delivers the complete solution with its gpsOne technology.

While conventional GPS devices offer great outdoor accuracy, gpsOne can pinpoint a receiver to within 5-15 meters in a broad range of environments, well beyond the minimum FCC requirement. So instead of just locating the general area, say within a few blocks... not only the exact street can be identified but which side of the street. This explains how police were able to track a stolen jewelry bag across over 12 kilometers of Tokyo's dense urban sprawl.

"The gpsOne tracking system is really extraordinary," says QUALCOMM's Arnold Gum. "We are seeing it used for a tremendous range of services."

In Korea, Japan and the United States, by early 2003, there were over 10 million gpsOne terminals functioning. To date, gpsOne is the most widely deployed commercial, high-accuracy positioning system and remains the only commercially proven GPS- based system for third generation wireless or 3G.

That's good news for mobile telecommunications service providers as they can increase their revenues from cell phone users. Aside from emergency services, the technology helps users find points of interest such as nearby restaurants, gas stations, and rest facilities and even navigate their way through the streets of a city; or find the location of a friend or family member.

Even so, it is in the personal safety and security field that these devices arguably offer their greatest benefits. In Japan, gpsOne has been adopted by SECOM, the leading provider of security services in that nation. It was a SECOM anti-theft tag that, when activated, allowed police to recover the stolen jewelry bag. Similar devices are also used as vehicle trackers: When extensively employed, such devices could eventually make car theft an occurrence of the past.

"Imagine the peace of mind a parent would enjoy if he or she knew exactly where his or her child was at any time," says Gum. "Today, in Korea and Japan, you can provide your child with a gpsOne device and, in an unexpected situation, locate your child or even have them driven home."

In Japan, SECOM Corporation's CoCo SECOM service provides location services for children and senior citizens as well as asset tracking tags for theft deterrence. In the United States, Oprah Winfrey has praised a wearable child safety watch with a GPS location finder embedded as, "unbelievable... cutting edge technology that will keep your child safe".

Far from alienating the population of an increasingly technologically complex world, location applications are saving lives and delivering peace of mind.

This is just the beginning. Stranded individuals, lost children and stolen or misplaced property could be significantly reduced as technologies like gpsOne are more extensively deployed in the years to come.

My phone, my hero? You bet, so don't leave home without it.