Personal locator services emerge

Abstract

C o n t r i b u t i n g Editor AT 1l.00ONEMORNlNGIN 1998,ANELDERLY WOMANINOSAKA, Japan, became alarmed. Her 73-year-old husband, who suffers from dementia, had left three hours earlier and not yet returned. She did not panic, but contacted the provider of her personal locator service, Life Service Center.Within aminute, the provider found him on the first floor of a department store, simply by paging a miniature locator device secured to the man's clothes.Thirty minutes later, when the man's son arrived at the department store, his father had already left. Fortunately, the service provider continued tracking the elderly man and was able to direct the son to the third floor of an Osaka hotel. At 12:10 p m . , the two were reunited. Locus Corp. provided the system that made this possible.

Query indexing and velocity constrained indexing: scalable techniques for continuous queries on moving objects

“…More recently, GPS devices are becoming active entities that transmit and receive information that is used to affect processing. Examples of these new applications include vehicle tracking [21], identification of closest emergency vehicles in Chicago [21], and Personal Locator Services [19]. Each of these examples represents commercial developments that handle small scale applications.…”

“…Applications can range from proximity-based queries on nonmobile objects, locating lost or stolen objects, tracing small children, helping the visually challenged to navigate, locate, and identify objects around them, and to automatically annotating objects online in a video or a camera shot. Examples of such services are emerging for locating people [19] and managing emergency vehicles [21]. These services correspond to queries that are executed over an extended period of time (i.e., from the time they are initiated to the time at which the services are terminated).…”

“…T HE combination of personal locator technologies [19], [34], global positioning systems [23], [33], and wireless [11] and cellular telephone technologies enables new location-aware services, including location and mobile commerce (L-and M-commerce). Current location-aware services allow proximity-based queries, including map viewing and navigation, driving directions, searches for hotels and restaurants, and weather and traffic information.…”

Main Memory Evaluation of Monitoring Queries Over Moving Objects

“…For example, to continuously compute an ε-join 1 between a set of relatively fixed points and another set of points that may move arbitrarily. Such continuous queries over ever-changing data are also important for many applications that handle streaming data from sensors and wireless location-based services in Location-commerce (L-commerce) [6] [17]. Towards this goal of wider applicability of our algorithms, we make no assumptions about the speed and nature of the movement of objects or the fraction of objects that can move at any time instant.…”

Enhancing the Map Usage for Indoor Location-Aware Systems

“…Location-aware systems are receiving more and more interest in both academia and industry due to their promising prospective in a broad category of so-called locationbased services (LBS) [1][2][3][4], such as people and asset tracking, security applications, navigation and location-based multimedia services. Generally, current location-aware systems can be separated into three groups: satellite based systems, sensor based systems, and local network-based systems.…”