June 6, 2009
Japan explores using cell phones to stop pandemics
Softbank Corp., a major Japanese Internet and cellular provider, will conduct a virtual experiment that uses phones to limit pandemics. GMA News reports.
The exact details have yet to be fixed, but Softbank hopes to pick an elementary school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server.
A few students will be chosen to be considered "infected," and their movements over the previous few days will be compared with those of everyone else. The stored GPS data can then be used to determine which children have crossed paths with the infected students and are at risk of having contracted the disease.
The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to get checked out by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections.
"The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, who works on infrastructure strategy at Softbank.
Read full article.
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2009/06/023770.htm