Tracking technology important, but not infallable

A tragedy in a Denver suburb earlier this week not only underscores the importance of the emerging category of devices designed to track people and assets, but the dire consequences that can occur when those devices fail to work properly. As regulators and authorities increasingly rely on wireless technologies to alert people to natural or manmade disasters, it is important to remember that no technology is failproof.
A 10-year-old autistic girl wandered away from her house Monday afternoon in Arvada. The child wore a Life Trak GPS device that was designed to alert authorities to her whereabouts in instances like this, but the device’s tracking signal failed to work, according to media reports. Colorado Life Trak is a program used by several police departments to monitor people with autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Down syndrome, traumatic brain injuries or cognitive impairments. The bracelets run on batteries and are checked monthly by law enforcement to make sure they work. In this instance, authorities are trying to find why the device didn’t discover the little girl, who was found dead at a nearby construction site that was surrounded by a tall fence.
In May, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Communications Commission announced PLAN – the Personal Localized Alerting Network, which is starting to roll out this year, with the support of major wireless operators. The service enables people to receive emergency alerts by text on their cellphones, but messages are not supposed to get clogged up in the network, like traditional texts sometimes do. The federal government is requiring wireless operators to be able to deliver emergency alerts by April 2012, or tell end users their service doesn’t have such a feature.
However, the program is not perfect either. Not all handsets are CMAS enabled yet, and as more nontraditional devices attach to the cellular network, it will be interesting to see if they are CMAS-enabled. And as this week’s tragedy in Arvada underscores, technology can fail, sometimes at the worst possible moment. Nevertheless, it is important to keep advancing the use of new technologies for the times when it does work – and doesn’t make headlines.