Where are your employees?

Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, emergency responders spent hundreds of man-hours trying to locate survivors and transport them to safety. The flooded streets and dilapidated buildings of New Orleans made it difficult for rescue workers to identify where survivors were geographically located. Some of them had to wait days for help to arrive.

Carlo Ratti, director of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Senseable City Laboratory, says he and his researchers have developed a technology that would have prevented the rescue crisis that ensued after Katrina. “Real Time Rome” is a real-time mapping system that tracks how people move in urban spaces by gathering data from mobile devices. The technology creates a population-based picture showing where increases occur. “Something like Katrina would never have happened if you had such a system,” he says. “You could identify where people were after a disaster and actually go and help them.”

Ratti says that in addition to emergency response, the technology could be used in corporate security applications. “We have been discussing the use of many technologies such as cell phones and WiFi. In general, locationing can have many applications in the corporate environment from logistics to emergency management,” he says. Ratti believes one of the key questions in the next year will be to find out how to manage location information and protect individual privacy.

“Real Time Rome” is currently being used to track how tourists move throughout the city of Rome and has partnered with Telecom Italia, Italy's main telephone operator.

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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