The post What Does the Future Hold for Geofencing? appeared first on Techso Mogro.
]]>In this posting, Jane describes a function of the technology that is common to smartphones. Every month my Android phone tells me where I have been. It only knows my location if I carry it. A-GPS chip built into the phone listens for the GPS satellites located in low-Earth orbit and as each passes overhead a combination of four or more calculate my approximate phone location and thereby, me.
But I will let Jane tell you how geolocation technology has morphed into geofencing.
Don’t be fooled by the term geofencing. It has nothing to do with rock collecting or sword fighting. Instead, it’s about using location-based services on people’s phones or drones to track their whereabouts. When you know where a person’s device is located, you know where they likely are. You can then send targeted advertising, monitor work activity or even warn them if they and their phone are entering unauthorized airspace.
In this posting, I describe geofencing’s most interesting uses.
A geofence is an invisible boundary drawn around a geographic area. It can be a city district, a building, or even a room. Geofencing uses geolocation which identifies the IP address of a device containing an A-GPS chip. Without geolocation, you cannot set up a geofence which can trigger an action when the device you are using enters or exits a virtually fenced area. Set your phone to enable location-based services, and you can be geofenced.
Drone enthusiasts should take note. If you fly your device above a military base, airport or prison in the United States, you will likely cross a geofence and prompt a geolocation alert. In the best-case scenario, a phone will receive a message informing you that you are in restricted airspace and advise you to turn back. Many no-fly geofenced zones, however, don’t send out a warning and can disable a drone. In this case, the drone will drop from the sky like a rock once it crosses the virtual boundary. So watch where you fly!
Know the whereabouts of vehicles equipped with a GPS-based fleet tracking device connected to a geofence. This is particularly important for vehicles delivering hazardous materials or time-sensitive packages. A lost shipment of explosives like fireworks, airbags or dynamite can present a massive liability. Geofencing lets you see when the vehicle has made it to its destination safely.
Geofencing can be used to create highly targeted advertising. For example, when you walk into a concert venue, you start getting promotional ads for tickets to a future event. When walking through a mall, your phone sends you menu offerings from the local food court. Walk into a store with geofencing and you receive a message promoting what’s on sale. A precaution, athough this method of advertising is effective it can also be very expensive.
Imagine a car dealership with a rival across the street. How can you use geofencing to attract the rival’s customers? Draw a geofence around the competition. That way when a potential customer crosses the virtual boundary you created, they will receive advertising on their phones from across the street. Hence the term, geoconquesting, a way to take location-based marketing to the next level.
It’s equivalent to putting up an advertising sign directly in the competition’s lobby. The only difference? The competition cannot remove it.
Companies use geofencing to monitor employees’ locations, a practice that has become more popular with the advent of remote work. For example, the Hubstaff mobile app uses screenshots paired with GPS data to determine where remote employees are working for the day.
Employers can also use geofencing to automatically clock workers in and out based on their location. When a staff member enters an office with a geofence, a time-tracking app opens and allows them to start logging their hours for the day. When the employee leaves, the app clocks them out.
A proposed use for geofencing is to pair the technology with firearms. Location-based guns would be unable to fire beyond a geofence. This would be useful for shooting ranges, hunting lodges, or in designated home spaces. Once the weapon goes beyond the virtual fence, it can no longer fire. This could help to prevent gun theft and armed robberies while still letting people own a gun for recreational use or hunting.
How do you know your location-based advertising is working? One way to measure its effectiveness is to count the number of phones receiving ads. Then track how many remain in the location after receipt. In this way, you can see if your geofencing campaign is driving foot traffic.
Because geofencing could be considered an invasion of privacy, many governments have enacted laws to regulate it. For example, the states of Washington and Nevada have passed regulations prohibiting geofencing around medical facilities. Connecticut bans geofences within 1,735 feet of mental or reproductive health clinics. The goal here is to protect patient privacy.
Ensuring marketers don’t use geofencing to promote products and services without understanding the potential harm it can do is leading more governments to enact regulations on how and where it can be used. In other words, geofencing’s use needs guardrails or a fence to remain effective as a targeted geographic marketing tool.
Geofencing isn’t just for marketers. As we have already described, it can monitor vehicles, automate time tracking and even protect sensitive locations from unwelcome visitors. But here are some future applications to consider:
Can you think of other ways geofencing can be used? Write back with your ideas and comments to let Techso Mogro know.
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Although the current global pandemic spread owes much to 21st-century technology, we can also use some of that wizardry to help track and control the threat in real-time.
Undoubtedly there will be lots of reflection once the COVID-19 pandemic passes. We will be reviewing emergency response plans and cities in the future will be able to apply the lessons learned to prepare themselves for similar threats. City leaders and scientists will look at the best ways to manage social distancing, disease tracking, and other defenses that help flatten the curve.
Smart city technology can play a major role in stopping disease spread in densely populated urban areas, and many are already outfitting themselves with the tools that they will need for the next pandemic.
How smart cities will be able to stop a pandemic in urban areas will depend on:
You’ve probably heard the term contactless delivery a lot over the past few months as social distancing and shelter in place orders have gone into effect. Autonomous delivery represents the best way to execute contactless interaction eliminating the need for a human deliverer to be involved in the transportation of goods.
We are just at the outset of implementing autonomous delivery. Expect to see in the near future self-driving trucks, more autonomous ships, and delivery drones that will make contactless a normative process that will ensure people are not inadvertently exposed to a virus through community spread.
The Internet of Things (IoT) allows software companies to track outbreaks using big data and language processing. BlueDot, a dashboard application that combines public health and medical expertise with AI algorithms, can assess risk and provide notification of infectious disease outbreaks. Developed by a team of epidemiologists, artificial intelligence and natural language processing experts, BlueDot sent out the first known alert of an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan on December 30th, ten days before the World Health Organization (WHO) issued any public statement on COVID-19. Smart cities can now benefit from the expertise of this type of application to do disease tracking in real-time, allowing citizens to be aware of immediate risks.
Geolocation applications on smartphones allow for the tracking of user locations in real-time. Initially designed to allow people to track where their friends are, and parents to keep a remote eye on their children’s whereabouts, the applications have a much more powerful use when the data can trace the path of a disease spreading through a community and predict what areas are most at risk. Smart cities in the future will use this type of data to predict which urban areas need to be put into lockdown before community spread gets out of control.
Smart cities are wired cities. They don’t just use the Internet to help in decision making and in the dissemination of information to the public, but also implement free WiFi to allow citizens to always be connected, especially in the event of an emergency.
In New York City free public WiFi is available through information kiosks that serve to be effective communication hubs. So although a person may not have a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, information delivered over the Internet is accessible to them in thousands of locations across the city. Imagine during a pandemic how this helps to facilitate paperless and ubiquitous communication.
Some see the arrival of semi and fully autonomous drones as the beginning of a surveillance state. For example, in China, drones have been used not just to survey the population tracking community spread, but also to enforce stay-at-home orders.
Using drone surveillance lets police shelter in place while still doing their jobs. They can monitor citizens’ movements through the onboard cameras. Some even have infrared cameras to detect a person’s body temperature, revealing if a citizen is running a fever, one of the symptoms that has been used to identify COVID-19 infection.
Recently I wrote about a robot dog named Spot that is patroling a park in Singapore to ensure visitors keep social distancing. Spot can operate autonomously or be directed by a remotely-located human attendant who can see through the robot’s eyes and speak to someone in the event of an emergency.
If you’re interested in learning more about smart city technology benefits beyond pandemic response, check out this visual provided by The Zebra below.
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