Geo-location technology in modern internet phones has interested me quite a bit of late. There’s a market for location-aware gaming on the horizon, not to mention commercial and advertising opportunities for retail and travel industries. My wife pointed me to an AP story this morning about a Japanese experiment in which GPS on elementary school children’s phones will be used to simulate the spread of contagious disease by tracking participant proximity. What a novel use of technology.
I imagine there are some privacy or safety concerns that could play into this, but the results of modeling disease spread using actual people in an non-controlled environment rather than a computer simulation could be quite useful. I’d like to find out if and how they plan to control for behavioral differences in the children under the assumption that they will be aware of the different implications of their contact with other kids during the study.
I’m resisting the urge to make some kind of joke about Logistics Visibility for school kids, here.