mishmap

It’s Christmas Eve, PST, and the jingle jingle of the final cash register is now only an echo. It seems like an appropriate time to put aside all those business plans which incorporate mobile locative technology. For a moment, let us forget how your cell phone will inevitably soon direct you to the nearest McDonalds, your dearest nearby friend in a one mile vicinity, or the next eligible single you haven’t met yet (but as luck and your PDA screen would have it happens to share your common interests and is sitting at the other end of the bar).

There is certainly a market for the above over-hyped ideas, but what about the more subtle concepts over which venture capitalists are not going ga-ga? I’m referring to the uses of location-aware technology which can make a positive difference in improving our society. Here is one example and I challenge you to think of others. Happy holidays!

The mobile social worker

Envision a new breed of social worker who actively seeks out people in need. This preventative approach would have people visiting different communities prone to issues like racial tension, poverty, or poor health.

Armed with a PDA loaded with a specialized application for the task at hand, the social worker would fill out an electronic form (a questionnaire) on-site. When done with the interview, she would publish it to a server, along with the current GPS coordinate.

GIS software (ArcView, openGIS, etc) would crunch the datapoints and come up with models for addressing a variety of escalating issues.

• Are there many people suffering from a particular ailment? What could be the cause? For example, we might be alerted to illegal toxic waste dumping if we layered maps of cancer rates with maps of manufacturing plants.
• Are many children in this community malnourished? Perhaps nutritious lunch time meals can be sent to their schools.
• Do interviews indicate escalating racial tension? Perhaps we should deploy relevant social workers to promote tolerance with the community before a tragedy.

As these examples demonstrate, an effective strategy might be:

1. Define/pose a question.
2. Deploy a mobile task force to answer it, using some hardware which can publish information along with a spatial coordinate.
3. Use GIS software to crunch the data
4. Respond

You may now resume your post-holiday shopping.