Dial geospatial for lifestyle


Chhandita Chakravarty
Editorial Consultant
Email: chhandita.chakravarty@GISdevelopment.net
What was originally developed as a military tool has today become a lifestyle statement. When the US military developed GPS, they couldn’t possibly have envisioned the various creative uses it would be put to in the future. Today GPS is used the world over by professionals, civilians, and hobbyists alike!

GPS has turned into a lifestyle tool for those who like to flaunt the latest gadgets with the newest technologies. Various lifestyle manufacturers are catering to consumers who want nothing but the best, who not only demand convenience but also something that will set them apart from the rest. In this article, we will get to know a few more uses for GPS that you may not even have heard of.

GPS for Tracking
One of the most popular uses of GPS has to be tracking. These wonderful devices can be used to track elders, patients suffering from neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s, children, pets and even cars!

A helping hand
Every year the number of seniors suffering from dementia keeps creeping up. Today, More than 26 million people worldwide live with Alzheimer's, and the figure is set to exceed 106 million by 2050. One of the biggest problem that caregivers face with dementia patients is that they ‘wander’ without anybody’s knowledge of where they are and where they might be going. This is where GPS comes into the picture. A new shoe fitted with a GPS chip offers peace of mind to Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers by allowing them to straight away see the location of the shoe wearer. It is also possible to set up a geofence around a user's home that would set off an alert to a cell phone or computer.

I Spy
Some, or maybe most children will call it spying, but for anxious parents it promises peace of mind. But with GPS, parents can now keep track with the help of satellites! Some of these devices come in the shape of micro-chips which are inserted into the skin of the child. Another tracking device looks like any ordinary digital wristwatch, but it has a GPS chip similar to that inside a satnav unit. This chip keeps a watch on the location of the child and sends back the information to the company’s website for monitoring. Parents can receive text messages about the watch's location direct from the device, indicating their children’s whereabouts. These watches can be locked onto a child’s wrist and if the child removes the watch or someone takes it from him, the system immediately sends an alert to the mobile phone of the parents.

For pet lovers
For pet lovers, losing their cat or dog can be a devastating experience. Fortunately, various GPS tracking devices are available to keep a tab on pets. Most of these devices come in the form of a little modem, which is attached to a pet’s collar. The minute the animal leaves any prearranged boundary, the device sends out an alert to the pet owner’s mobile phone. The GPS modem also provides the exact direction, even maps, to help the owner locate his/her lost pet.

Vehicle Tracking
Car theft? That’s no longer an issue with GPS enabled tracking devices in hand. Vehicle tracking devices come in various shapes and sizes. These can be attached to any metallic part of a car using a magnet and picks the vehicles position within 2.5 meters. One doesn’t need a PC connected to it to obtain the data. Data collected from the device is compatible with Google Earth. The device also comes in handy if one drives for work, using a GPS to track one’s mileage would also be a convenient way to keep tabs on the driving if one needs to report either for company reimbursement!

Driving in the right direction
Getting from one place to another is not always easy. The truth is that asking for directions is not always a feasible or reliable option and paper maps are cumbersome to carry. And the fact that paper maps do not always mention those quaint little places that you might want to visit. You might be traveling with a car-load full of chattering kids or passengers taking never-ending mobile phone calls who could impede your progress and make you miss that vital turn. Even if you have an able navigator at your side, getting lost on the road is a distinct possibility in our metros. But thanks to technology, these GPS devices can be installed in your car and act as the perfect navigators, helping you reach your destination faster then you ever thought possible. These devices are also multitaskers – playing music and movies and storing images while helping you steer through congested streets.

A gift for someone you love
For those who like to think out of the box, GPS provides the ideal gift idea. How about buying a location enabled mobile phone for that friend who forever forgets directions? GPS enabled mobile phones can act as a navigation system and provide step by step instructions to reach a particular destination. Some GPS enabled phones also provide rerouting option. When someone moves to the wrong direction these, top-end mobiles will indicate about the wrong diversion and assist the user to take the correct direction.

These GPS enabled mobiles also provide easy access to location based utilities. There are various categories loaded in these mobiles that include the route to the nearest movie theatres, hotels, amusement parks etc. Then it will determine your destination and after that it will download the results on your phone search.

Another innovative gift idea is geotagged cameras. Geotagging with the use of GPS and one’s digital camera is a pretty amazing new way to take travel and location photography to a new level. One can now actually shoot various pictures on vacation, and the photos are labeled with the location where they were taken. These pictures can be viewed with a Google map or included into Flickr geotagging for sharing with friends.



Keeping fit with GPS
For the fitness freaks, GPS based, electronic personaltraining devices are heaven sent. One of these devices comes in the shape of a wrist watch which has a GPS receiver housed separately in an arm- or belt-mountable POD. These devices not only provide speed, distance and heart rates of the user, but also contain waypoint, mapping and positional modes. At the face of it, the watches may seem pretty simple but once all the data from the device is dumped in a PC (Training Manager Software), the results can be boggling. There are graphs on speed, heart rate, altitude, speed over time and speed over distance. When the GPS from the watch provide’s enough data (which it does), the software works out the maximum heart rate, and approximate values normally only used by selected athletes, with ventilation rate (how hard you’re breathing), oxygen consumption rate (VO2) and energy consumption in kCal/min, and more available. With all the data made available, the software estimates the effectiveness of a workout regime, telling one when one overtraining, improving fitness or maintaining current levels.

Teeing Off
From only player enhancement to complete course management systems - Golf GPS systems have come a long way and are constantly evolving. The principal objective of a golf GPS system is to make available to players distances to all kind of features on the course and to the green they are playing. GPS offers to options for gold - course-owned golf GPS systems and player-owned golf GPS systems. The main advantage of a player owned system is that the golf GPS can reduce the time it takes to play a round. This means that a course can accommodate more players per day, which results in higher revenues. Course-owned golf GPS systems offer a lot more opportunities. These systems allow the Golf course management to be in constant touch with all the players, send useful information like weather- forecasts and even advertisements to the players, all the while keeping a tab on what’s going on the course. Players can also order food and beverages, while teeing off!

GPS enhanced friday nights
Confused about where to go out on a Friday night? The solution is just a thumb-click away. Friday nights will never be the same again with a new mobile map application that instantly shows where the hotspots are at the flick of a thumb. This GPS enabled mobile phone gives users a real-time view of how busy the city is as well as where the busiest places currently are. Users simply download the free application onto their mobiles and view a "heat" map of activity throughout the area. The map is linked to Google, which enables the users to get more information about a particularly ‘happening’ spot. Focusing on nightlife, the device notifies the users not just where the activity is, but where to find people with similar tastes at any given moment! How does the application do this? By tracking and comparing the users' history and preferences, and matching it with others. Now that’s a very important aspect of a fun night out after all.

Travel by GPS
With the ever increasing usage of GPS applications and devices, various industries are redefining their work structure. The tourism is one such industry. Instead of a traditional tour led by a human guide, GPS is enabling tour operators to use automated mechanism that routes the users to a location and offers up to date exact information about that place. The number of GPS devices sold in the world has skyrocketed in the past few years, increasing the number of people owning GPS devices to increase substantially. This has compelled and encouraged the tourism industry to embrace this technology. GPS manufacturers are already taking advantage of this new innovation. Like a recently launched device that allows the tour operators to display audio, images, and text to users when they are at a certain geographic location. Other companies are also beginning to enter the GPS tour arena. Some companies allow users to create GPS tours through their websites where users can create a GPS tour using an easyto- use web site. Once a user has created a GPS tour, it can then be shared with other users across the globe or downloaded to a GPS device. Recent times have seen some very inventive uses of GPS tours like helicopter tours, real estate tours, and national park tours

GPS Gaming
Geotainment is the new buzz word! GPS games are the newest addition to games on the PC, mobiles or consoles. Gaming is not only a hobby for many but it has taken on a form of a professional sport too. At any given time people from all over the world are playing this new age means of entertainment – age no bar! The newest to join this gaming bandwagon are GPS applications with thousands of GPS games having been created by the gaming community in more than 70 countries. The good news is that these games are now available in mobiles. Just like in bigger online mulitplayer games for PC or consoles, this applications makes possible complex player actions for the first time in location based gaming on mobiles. Just like any other video or computer game, the players can pick up items like weapons at one place, drop them somewhere else, share them with other players in reality.

Networking with GPS
Just like the Internet brought people together and raised social networking to a whole new level, companies are also looking at ways to use GPS as a social networking tool. In the future, friends may be able to track us anywhere we go and find out what we are up to, as long as our handphone’s GPS function is enabled. Some might call it invasion of privacy, we call it moving forward. These mobile and Internet enabled applications are the way networking will be done in the future. Most such applications are still in testing levels. They are basically location and microblogging services that enable us to pinpoint a friend’s exact location using GPS and then makes it possible to share what we are doing with our friends. One can even set up meetings or appointments with the help of these applications.

Treasure Hunting with GPS
Another very interesting and a little elite usage of GPS is Geocaching. Hobbyists and outdoor sport enthusiasts use GPS to play a high-tech, worldwide treasurehunting game called Geocaching. The game is pretty similar to the childhood game of hide and seek. People hide things all over the world, and one uses their GPS unit to go to the area and try to find the hidden treasure or cache. These “geocaches” or treasures are generally nothing more then a waterproof container with a logbook or some trinkets of little value. Today, the number of people playing this high-tech game stands at around 937,510. The players and caches are located all over the world, on all continents, including Antarctica! This hugely popular game is also known as GPS treasure hunting. Apart from GPS devices, cables and paper printouts, geocache players now can also use a mobile enabled Geocache navigator, making it easier for newcomers to understand and play better.

Mapping the future
We all know that online mapping tools like MapQuest and Google Maps help people get from Point A to B. But these online applications now serve a much bigger and important purpose too. A small example is ‘Ushahidi’, created in 2007 to track the violence taking place in Kenya during the country’s presidential elections. The application allowed people to submit information, which was displayed on a map, pinpointing locations where violence was taking place.

The mapping programme used by ‘Ushahidi’ is know by technical experts as crowd sourcing. One very interesting outcome of such a mapping platform is ‘Vote Report India’. It is a website featuring an interactive map which allows its users to report and track election related events taking place in India. Mapping is definitely playing a big role in democracy but that is not all! Mapping has now another role to play, that of a crime fighter. Police departments across the world are embracing the Web to fight crime. They take data from police reports, using them in tandem with birds-eye-view maps to locate crime hotspots. These maps can be sent to squad cars which are equipped with compatible computers, giving the officers instant access to crime locations.

Conclusion
Isn’t it exciting to be living in a time when everyday brings something new? The list of lifestyle devices using GPS and other geospatial technologies is ever increasing. It is difficult to list them in a few pages.

But what is clear is that in the future geospatial technology will not just be a lifestyle choice but a necessity. So, take a pick, and go for your favourite GPS device. It won’t be long before they become commonplace. Be a part of the revolution.