In response to the Webware Challenge to make cell phones into better lifelines, many (hundreds) of people added comments and wrote to me personally to say the main solution to finding people who are lost or stranded should be better cellular phone coverage, cell phones with emergency satellite radios, or dedicated emergency locator beacons. I support all of these ideas, but as I said in a previous post, I still think we could use a "fail-safe" notification system that alerts friends, families, or authorities when a person goes missing. If a person is unable to make a call for any reason (injury or crime), becoming aware of their situation is the necessary Step One. Finding them is Step Two.
As it turns out, there is at least one company that offers this service: Safety Trip Plan. With this online product, you register your "flight plan" and the time by which you should arrive at your destination. When you arrive, you need to cancel the fail-safe alert (online or by phone, presumably). If you don't, Safety Trip Plan will attempt to contact you, and if it can't, it will quickly mount a search for you in the area you were last known to be. The service costs $45 per year per family.
It's a good start, but it also looks like a recipe for a lot of false alarms, since the subscriber has to remember to cancel the alert when they arrive. A rep from the company told me, "At the moment, we expect the registrant to cancel. We do have some who forget, but they only forget once, so it has worked best this way."
I'm still looking for a company to develop a system that has Safety Trip Plan's notification escalation, but one that is also a bit easier to use--in other words, a service that will remind you to cancel the alarm, instead of requiring you to remember. The easier a service is, the more likely people will be to use it. It's one thing to file a plan when you're about to hike into the wilderness but another to file one when you're heading out to look at an apartment rental you saw on Craigslist. If a fail-safe alert system requires too much thought to use, people won't apply it in day-to-day travels.
I know a few people are working on new fail-safe alerting systems, and I hope to report on them in early January when I come back from my winter vacation.
There have been a few dozen good responses to the post I wrote about new technologies or services that could help find people who get into trouble while traveling. See A Webware challenge: Make cell phones better lifelines.
It begins with notification. You don't send out rescue parties until you know someone is lost, and my initial proposal simply allows the alarm to be raised earlier. Several people rightly commented that it would be difficult to create a "flight plan" system that people would actually use. But I will not dismiss this idea just yet; some of the latest Web apps make data entry incredibly easy, and if itinerary information is already in a personal organizer of some sort, creating the plan and the notification schedule could become almost completely hands-off.
Still, human nature and the realities of travel being what they are, it will mostly fall to people who become lost to call for help. But how? Clearly, if there were cellular coverage in the Oregon wilderness we wouldn't be mourning the loss of James Kim today. A few people wrote that the United States, multiple competing cellular technologies were a contributor to the tragedy. If all carriers were on the same technology, money could be spent improving overall coverage instead of duplicating it in only the most profitable markets. However, extending the coverage to rural and wilderness areas would likely require government action.
(Credit:
MoloGogo)
There are products and technologies designed specifically to locate people who are stranded far from civilization. Emergency locator beacons are standard in airplanes, for example. They're activated only in life-threatening emergencies and send distress signals via satellite over a dedicated emergency band. See Equipped To Survive's Ultimate Personal Locator Beacon FAQ. Newer personal models are not much bigger than cell phones and have both built-in GPS and short-range locator beacons as well. These devices are expensive, however, and people who rarely leave well-traveled areas are unlikely to invest in them. One proposal involved a different economic model for emergency locators: Sell the devices for cheap but make using them very expensive. That would get the hardware into more hands and, theoretically, would not overwhelm the system with false alarms.
A few readers mentioned Verizon's Chaperone program, which allows family members to locate loved ones' cellular phones. The service will even alert you when the phone leaves a defined geographic area, a feature called "geofencing." In the case of someone who goes missing and who leaves the cellular coverage area, presumably the Chaperone program would tell its subscriber (not the person who has the phone) where the phone was last seen, without requiring him or her to jump through legal hoops to get the data. See also Sprint's Family Locator service.
There are also similar solutions for business users of the Nextel network, such as Xora [see video here]. And then there's the Web 2.0 company Mologogo, which can access GPS data from Nextel phones (and phones from the Boost consumer subbrand of Nextel) and publish that to the people you want, ranging from the world to just your family.
A few people offered an idea that seems obvious in retrospect: If cellular signals can be used to triangulate the location of a subscriber, why not set up airplanes or even blimps with cellular receivers for locating phones that stray to out-of-service areas? I believe this should be something every search-and-rescue team has access to.
See also our story on News.com: Survival and prevention tips: Share your suggestions.
Shortly after we got the crushing news of James Kim's death, I received an e-mail from a human resources person here at CNET. She wrote, "I would love to see a Web site dedicated to the safety of employees. Employees should be able to submit their travel routes and whereabouts. Whether it's on a road trip or visiting an apartment listed on Craigslist, providing information on where employees are and the related circumstances may be extremely helpful in the event that an emergency or dangerous situation occurs."
I forwarded this idea to several people who run mapping and life story start-ups, and I received heartfelt offers to participate in the creation of such a system, especially from Platial and OurStory. Today I've been talking with a few people here and the idea is evolving. I wanted to share the latest.
What we need is a fail-safe service that will raise the alarm when a person goes missing. There should be a Web service where you enter your itinerary and personal contact information. At each scheduled waypoint, the service calls your mobile phone or sends you a text message, simply asking, "Have you arrived safely at your destination?" If you have, you say so. If you don't answer, the system moves to the next step: It tries again, it tries alternate numbers (your hotel, the airline, the car rental company, and so on), and if you cannot be reached or located, it calls your designated contacts, who can determine whether to contact emergency personnel in the appropriate area. (If no one can be reached, it could escalate automatically.)
Such a system could be built into a mapping service or integrated into a trip-planning site, such as Orbitz or Travelocity. Or it could just be a stand-alone "flight plan" system for all of us.
The advantage is that it wouldn't needlessly bug family or friends until you were actually not responding to hails. (Of course it would need to be integrated with flight tracking so that it didn't assume you were missing when your flight was simply delayed.)
Disadvantages? Several. What if you're overseas and your phone doesn't work? What if you deviate from your plans and are fine, but you're out of touch when you said you'd be reachable? What of you're just moving through a poor cell phone coverage area? I don't claim that this idea is foolproof as written, but I do believe that something like it could help people who get in into trouble when traveling.
If anybody knows of such a system, or plans to build one, e-mail me or leave comments on this post. I'll report back if it gets traction.
(Actually finding a missing person or group is another challenge, but I am sure there are solutions, yet to be built, that could help there, too--including technological platforms that could more quickly and easily locate cell phones even when they are not in service areas, and policies and procedures to release that data in a timely manner.)
Cell phones are already lifelines. Let's make them better ones.
James Kim was one of CNET's most beloved personalities. For those of us who worked with him, he was our friend and a member of our family. An e-mail we got today shows that many of you felt the same way. It reads, "James came into my home once, sometimes twice a week, and he was like family."
In that spirit, we've put together a CNET TV playlist of some of the best James Kim videos we could find and a compilation of the moments that made us love him the most. James charmed everyone who met him or saw him on CNET or TechTV before that. Please join us in remembering James and his work. We will all miss him more than we can say.
UPDATE: The body of missing CNET editor James Kim has been located, authorities announced Wednesday.
Arrangements are being made to transport Kim to the Oregon State Police office in the town of Central Point, Ore., for a medical examination, according to police, and autopsy results may be completed by Thursday. He had been missing in the remote southwestern Oregon wilderness for 11 days and was found at approximately noon Wednesday about half a mile from the Rogue River, authorities said.
Kim, 35, left his family's stranded car Saturday morning in search of help and never returned. He apparently traveled in an 8-mile circle and was found less than a mile, separated by a sheer cliff, from where his family's station wagon had gotten stuck in the snow. Officers said there was no way to determine whether he was trying to return to his starting point or if he became disoriented.
"He was very motivated...he traveled a long way," Josephine County Undersheriff Brian Anderson said.
The Kim family has asked that it not be contacted, and that flowers and donations not be sent at this time. Once the family has decided how they want Kim to be honored, CNET will release details.
His 30-year-old wife, Kati, and daughters Penelope (4 years) and Sabine (7 months) were rescued in good condition Monday and have been reunited with family members. Kati Kim suffered frostbite on two toes but will not lose them, according to a close family friend.
"They have been true champions throughout this whole ordeal," Lt. Gregg Hastings of the Oregon State Police said of the Kim family. "We just want them to know our thoughts and our prayers have been with them from day one."
See News.com for additional coverage.
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