Someone to watch over us: the GeoBusiness Group is combining CAD, GIS, RFID, and other technologies to enable the effective tracking of people and other assets indoors.(Trends in Geomatics)

Geospatial Solutions, September, 2006 by Wong, Kenneth

From a recent experiment conducted at a clothing store in a mall, Michel Berthiaume, an associate researcher at the GeoBusiness Group, Universite de Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, discovered something surprising about teenagers. For better or for worse, approximately 80 percent of them are willing to surrender some of their privacy and allow someone to track their movements.

On the plus side, this made it easier for Berthiaume to do his job, because he needed to observe and record the teens' paths by way of an RFID-enabled (radio frequency identification) tag attached to them. The data collected were subsequently analyzed, using temperature maps, pathway analysis, market segmentation, retail zones, and geostatistics.

As far-fetched as it may seem,...

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