A few months from now, a highly contagious disease will spread through a Japanese elementary school. The epidemic will start with several unwitting children, who will infect others as they attend classes and wander the halls.
If nothing is done, it will quickly gain momentum and rip through thestudent body, then jump to parents and others in the community. But officials will attempt to stymie the disease and save the school — using mobile phones.
The sickness will be a virtual one, in an experiment funded by the Japanese government. A subsidiary of Softbank Corp., a major Japanese Internet and cellular provider, has proposed a system that uses phones to limit pandemics.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment