Blue Tree Services Ltd: location products that work

Where are personal GPS tracking systems being used

Everyone is somewhere. Personal GPS location systems let us take care of those we love and ensure workers and others are safe. Increasingly people are using these systems for pleasure and lifestyle: finding their friends and networking in busy towns and cities and at events.

Skip forward for more on:

the care of the elderly and those who wander,
family uses, particularly child protection and teenage drivers,
mobile phone tracking,
vehicle tracking, or
business applications, lone and community workers, cycle and motorbike couriers and more

Read on for lifestyle applications.

KoolTrax™ Mobile and lifestyle applications

KoolTrax™ Mobile is new software from Blue Tree Services that helps you convert your mobile phone into a GPS tracking device. Take the opportunity to get yourself a state of the art mobile phone with GPS capability, convert it into a tracker.

There's a whole world of location based gaming out there, geocaching for instance. Take a look at what Blast Theory is doing too.

Read more about KoolTrax™ Mobile here.

Protection and help for those who wander

There are a number of people who need care partly because they wander. Wandering is a recognised issue for people with Alzheimer's and other dementia, where people may wander and get lost or forget where they are. People with autism often benefit, as do those who sleepwalk (or those who live with a sleepwalker).

For those who are able, the panic button on the KoolTrax™ Ranger provides the means for them to trigger alert texts, emails and/or on-screen messages to those who are caring for them, simply by pressing a single button. The carers can, of course, see the person's exact location.

Whether they press the alert button or not, they are easily located using KoolTrax™ PC on a PC which would show a street map, a historical satellite image, or both, along with the person's location.

If they are prone to deliberate escape, KoolTrax™ Ranger can alert carers when it is no longer being worn and show its current location which would be the place where the person removed the device.

Use of such tracking devices is gratefully encouraged by the police and other authorities, and very much appreciated by the carers too, who no longer have to spend valuable time and resources looking for a missing person.

Families, child protection and security

Protection against child abduction is a headline issue, and it's true that a KoolTrax™ Ranger device may well be one of the best protections against your child being abducted. We wouldn't like to overstate the danger, however.

The chance of one of your children being subject to an attempted abduction in England and Wales is about 1 in 13,000 per year, and a successful abduction 1 in 130,000. To put this in perspective, the chance of your child being killed in a car accident is 1 in 510 each year (we can help with that, click the link below), and the chance of being struck by lightning is about 1 in 3.7 million. So, child abduction is real but rare.

The fear of child abduction is very real, however. It's something we understandably don't feel very able to cope with. Many parents feel better when they are able to see where their kids are.

One consequence is that while we may have had the freedom to play unsupervised, todays children are almost continually supervised until adulthood. Some say that's not good.

Overall, it's just nice to know where our kids are .. especially if they are a few minutes late from school. It's probably a lot healthier for them to arrive home to an understanding parent who knows they were on their way than one fraught with worry.

Many of our clients believe that by using KoolTrax™ Ranger, they've been able to give their children more freedom while reclaiming some of their own time instead of spending it constantly watching the kids.

But it's not just smaller kids who parents want to track. A teenager out on the town at night may well want to be picked up at the end of the night. You can set a temporary boundary around the venue and, when they leave you'll receive an alert and know to set off to pick them up promptly. You could even snooze while waiting. If it's a large event, our systems are more likely to get a mobile signal because they try continuously, whereas a mobile phone conversation requires the user to get a signal and go through the routine of making the call.

When your kids get old enough to drive and want to borrow the family car, or want money for a car of their own, part of the deal may be that they use a KoolTrax™ Ranger or mobile phone with KoolTrax™ Mobile when they go. Then you can see if they exceed the speed limit, and they can use that as a reason not to get caught up in bravado with their mates.

It might seem unlikely that a young adult would be happy to take a KoolTrax™ Ranger device with them, but if it means they don't have to ring their mum to let them know where they are going and if they get more freedom as a result, it might easily be seen as socially acceptable, even desirable. Of course, a mobile phone sufficient to run KoolTrax™ Mobile would be very desirable.

For busy people, working away and with elderly parents to think about, KoolTrax™ Ranger could provide data about how long it is since they've left the house .. you can display a breadcrumb trail showing where someone has been over up to a month. You can receive an alert if they leave the house. It all provides a talking point too: "I see you were out the other night, did you have a good time?"

KoolTrax™ Ranger tracks whoever is wearing it, so you can pass it around the family according to your needs. If someone is travelling, or orienteering, cycling, running or walking you can track their location. On holiday .. you can watch their movements. You can find them in an amusement park or shopping centre. You might even enjoy a techno game of hide and seek.

Mobile phone tracking

Put simply, practically the only effective way to track the position of a mobile phone is using GPS.

Vehicle tracking

Most vehicle tracking systems are installed in your car, which is fine if that's what you want. Ours offers the additional possibility of tracking the driver or rider.

Business uses

Businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency, lower costs, reduce risk and gain competitive advantage, and KoolTrax™ Ranger and KoolTrax™ Mobile answers all those needs.

Vehicle tracking is already established. Many sales and delivery vehicles and taxis are already fitted with tracking devices, but tracking devices can't reasonably be fitted to hire vehicles or to employees' own vehicles, or indeed to bicycles or motorbikes.

For people who work in the community, district nurses, social workers and occupational therapists for instance, KoolTrax™ Ranger provides an alarm button and no-movement alarm facility that would alert the office and provide location data.

Care home workers caring for people who wander, and with anxious relatives to cater for, appreciate the ability to find their clients quickly without wasting their own or, ultimately, police time.

Companies with employees in insecure locations, in the oil industry, in charity or environmental work, news crews and diplomatic staff and their families, all may find they are better able to recruit the best people and that those people work better because they are less stressed if the company can show it provides for its employees' security.