GPS Tech Review

Presently there is just one geriatrician in the U.S. for every 5,000 seniors; about half of what there should be, according to the American Geriatrics Society.

The problem is that fewer medical students are choosing this subspecialty because treating older patients who have multiple, complex problems makes it difficult for a doctor to make a living as they require significantly more time to treat. Medicare doesn’t progressively compensate for an extended 45-minute appointment with a dementia patient. Says Dr. Bruce Robinson; “These patients require the most time and pay the worst.”

Consequently, the shortage of geriatricians is also worsening. While medical students elect other more lucrative specialties than geriatrics, the population of those over 65 is accelerating faster than ever in our nation’s history with one in every eight an Alzheimer’s victim. The American Geriatrics Society estimates that by 2030, there will be a shortage of 36,000 geriatricians in the U.S., up from 7,000 today.

Alzheimer’s disease has reached crisis proportions in the United States, with incidence, prevalence, and mortality all on the rise. Today there are now more than 5.3 million people with Alzheimer’s disease.  The Alzheimer’s Association has projected an increase of 12-14 million new cases by 2030 as there is no cure for the disease. With rising medical and assisted living costs, the burden of daily care for these ravished victims rests most often with the more than 10 million unpaid family caregivers.

These staggering statistics do not take into account the additional cost of monitoring and retrieving the 60% of the afflicted that will wander off and become lost. If not recovered within hours their fragile health will fail rendering them a mortality statistic and a significant expense for the municipality that will be called in to search for them.

 Using 2 way personal GPS Tracking technologies it will be possible in just a few months for caregivers to enjoy the 24×7 peace of mind that comes with knowing where their loved-ones are with a push of a button on a Smart Phone. While medicine cannot yet pinpoint the cure, GPS Personal Location Services technology can now pinpoint the person.

3G Smart Phones, GPS Shoe, GPS Tracking, Location Based Services March 3rd, 2010

The FDA has approved Aricept®, Namenda®, Exelon®, and Razadyne® for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease which affects 30 million people worldwide.  Presently, none of these medications prevents or stops the advance the disease itself. However, billions of dollars are being invested in new drug research. Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Elan are in third stage trials, but the commercial availability of their formulas remains several years away.

The disease progressively robs the patient of their cognitive minds and physically debilitates them. As the disease progresses through its fatal stages certain life threatening behaviors unique to the disease may present themselves. Research tells us that 60% of all Alzheimer’s victims may become intermittently disoriented and lose awareness of who they are and where they are. There is no warning for “wandering” and restraining the afflicted would restrict their independence and destroy personal dignity while they are still living functional lives.

 Two companies; GTX Corp and Aetrex Worldwide have partnered to produce a patented GPS enabled shoe that will soon afford caregivers with the ability to instantly locate their loved ones and know their path, direction and speed on a smart phone with the push of a button enabling speedy retrieval which will provide peace of mind to the caregiver and prevent their early demise owing to exposure from the elements.

3G Smart Phones, GPS Shoe, Location Based Services March 2nd, 2010

Everyone does it… checks the map on their GPS smart phone to see where they are, decide where they are going and how best to get there. Social Locating is a task fast becoming a habit. With Personal Location Search come opportunities for mobile advertisers to use the GPS mapping functionality for proximity marketing.

Geo-fencing is a tool that allows a GPS enabled cell phone user to establish a “virtual boundary” around a location. When the user’s phone either enters or leaves the Geo Fence it triggers an SMS message. Advertisers are planning to use the personal location service to place GF’s around shopping centers and specific stores. With the permission of a smart phone carrying shopper, breaking the GF will trigger a personal coupon or other promotional offer connecting the customer with a retailer and their peer group at a specific location.

3G Smart Phones, APP Store, Location Based Services February 26th, 2010

Value conscious consumers are using smart phones for making price-comparisons with QR-bar code reader apps driving ABI Research’s mobile transactions projection for 2010 to double in the U.S. potentially reaching $2.4 billion.

Trend Spotters watched as consumers purchased items in brick & mortar stores using their web-enabled handsets to scan product bar codes for comparison shopping.

Rapid uptake of Mercatur and Boku are making it possible to conduct smart phone transactions with purchases posted directly to the subscriber’s phone carrier.

This too has seen, as mobile payments are the best option for online purchases under $20 or so, and this way of shopping is especially suitable for those consumers—often young gamers—without credit cards.

All of these trends led to ABI’s prediction that mobile transactions will reach $119 billion globally in 2015 which doesn’t take into account the impact that companies like GTX Corp’s location aware GPS marketing will influence merchants and shoppers.

3G Smart Phones, Location Based Services, Mobile Phones February 22nd, 2010

As GTXCorp launches Version1.3 of its GPS tracking iLOCi2, smart phone app, we become increasingly aware of the growing size of our respective personal networks and the need to know their location in addition to their proximity to each other contact in real time. This version of the app doubles the number of contacts that can be LOCi’d from eight to sixteen with the next release expected to be unlimited.

Early proof of this growing need to know where – is evidenced by the recent launches of Crowd Sourcing intelligent networking platforms; Jigsaw, Spigit, Crowdcast, Jive and Bright Idea that are based on the input of a group’s intelligence, their multiple personal locations and the ability to extrapolate ideas and actions with the aid of unique algorithms.

Crowd Sourcing in its most mundane application is presently used to describe traffic jams by anonymously stripping location data from multiple cell phones carried by drivers on highways. In its more intelligent applications, contacts are linked by their intellectual contributions and knowledge bases. When these apps achieve a level of ubiquity… the iPhone and iPod touch are available in 77 countries… the iLOCi2 app is available in 52 countries… the potential for collaborative intelligence should produce amazing results.

3G Smart Phones, APP Store, Global Positioning Systems, Location Based Services, Mobile Phones October 16th, 2009

The abduction of Elizabeth Smart was a depraved assault against us all. It took away the sanctuary that each of our homes was supposed to provide our loved ones. The crime so infuriated Patrick Bertagna that he spent the next seven years and millions of dollars developing the GTX Corp  technology that would afford each of us embedded GPS monitoring solutions that would discretely provide our location on a smart phone, PDA or computer. Nine months of terror could have been reduced to nine seconds, nine minutes or nine hours, but not nine years.

SALT LAKE CITY October 1st, 2009 @ 8:56pm — It was a moment six years in the making. Elizabeth Smart took the stand at U.S. District Court Thursday during a competency hearing for her accused kidnapper Brian David Mitchell.

For two hours, the 21-year-old recounted the details from the nine months she was held in captivity. [CLICK HERE to read Elizabeth Smart's entire testimony]

She testified Brian David Mitchell came into her bedroom on the night of June 5, 2002, held a knife to her throat and told her to get up quietly, or he’d kill her and her family.

She said he told her to get her shoes on. When she reached for slip-on shoes, he told her to get some tennis shoes.

3G Smart Phones, GPS Shoe, Location Based Services October 4th, 2009

The answer is simple; get fifty very talented people together. Then get them to spend five years miniaturizing the GPS gear, developing an intuitive interactive portal and make those solutions interface with the most popular smart phones… then use Google Premier to show the push pin location of people and assets – while reporting the bearing, speed, altitude, and current activity in real time in addition to archiving a history of activity and providing geo-fence alerts. They even found a way to put all of that into a GPS shoe that will save the lives of wandering Alzheimer’s victims. Read the why’s and where for’s from Google about GTXCorp >>

3G Smart Phones, GPS Shoe, Location Based Services September 29th, 2009

While only 18% of all iPhone apps downloaded are paid, the current annual sales of $340+ million cannot be ovelooked. Moreover, Yankee Group’s estimate of that number rising to $1B in just two years speaks volumes about the ways our world is changing. The presence of smart phones will grow four fold in as many years to numbers that will have everyone connected wirelessly with each other and to every content source around the world in real time.

Amazing doesn’t begin to describe this paradigm shift in social connectedness. Like the bees, we will be a living hive of activity producing, consuming and sharing with one another. An interesting thing about bees is the way they communicate where to find nectar. While they do not have GPS, they do manage to accurately share the longitude and lattitude to others in the hive.

In a similar fashion, LOCiMOBILE by GTX Corp has developed an iPhone App using smart phone GPS technology to do the same thing as the bees… share your location with co workers, family members and friends. Some even keep tabs on their kids. The iPhone itself has become the swiss army knife of this generation offering a tool for just about everything… in the palm of your hand. MORE >>>

3G Smart Phones, APP Store, Location Based Services September 23rd, 2009

In a recent article, Emma Woollacott wrote of Motorola’s announcement of its first Android device, the Cliq – and it’s the first mobile phone with social skills.

Featuring the company’s new Motoblur technology, the Cliq syncs contacts, posts, messages, alerts, photos and personal location services from sources such as social networking sites and email, automatically delivering it to the home screen.

Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of Motorola Mobile Devices spoke about “phones that are instinctive, social and smart.” To be sure, the pace of innovation in the mobile phone sector will keep developers and manufacturers in a race to make their efforts both invisible and seamless. The question remains; if the ultimate consumer appeal is for an App to be instinctive, then how did we learn what we have yet to invent?

3G Smart Phones, APP Store, Location Based Services September 13th, 2009

Ubiquitous computing. Any science fiction writer will tell you that we’re already living the future — almost anything dreamed of can be done if you have enough money to do it. But a technology really doesn’t move from fantasy to reality until it’s everywhere, and thanks to the iPhone 3G, computing has become just that. You can’t take a laptop around with you all the time to edit photos or post to your blog, but you can bring the iPhone. It’s the ultimate ultramobile platform, and it’s now cheap enough to be everywhere, and powerful enough that almost any common computing task can be done.

Connectivity. This will only get better, of course, but 3G is a nice step forward, and as Apple showed us, every app on the iPhone can stay in touch and stay connected. And the mere fact that we now have the Internet (not a mobile form of it, the actual Internet) in our pockets at all times has already changed our world. Everyone who owns an iPhone has had “an iPhone moment” already — just the other day, the bartender couldn’t remember how to make a drink my friend wanted to order, so I looked it up and immediately had the recipe. That’s what constant connectivity means — it’s been possible before, but , and applications that stay connected make it even easier.

Location awareness. Until now, consumer GPS has been for cars and geocachers. But no more — every iPhone 3G knows exactly where it is, and any app in the App Store can make use of that information. That opens up all kinds of new ways to use that data, most of which we haven’t even thought of yet. Mobile computing is fun, but mobile computing that already knows where it is makes a lot more possible, and not only will that mean we’ll see amazing implementations on the iPhone (games that keep track of other players in the real world, or apps that can track your daily movement), but we’ll see other mobile platforms push for location awareness as well. MORE>

3G Smart Phones, APP Store August 5th, 2009