Although faking a smile might be easy, you can’t fool your mobile phone.

Just when you think our phones know just about everything about us, they can now even detect when we are feeling sad, according to a new study from Northwestern University in Illinois.

To get a diagnosis of depression, you normally have to fill out a questionnaire giving details about your mood as well, as undergo long interviews with a psychiatrist. Now, however, some of this work can be handled through smartphone apps — or at least give you an indication if you are at risk of becoming depressed. This is done through collecting data as well as GPS tracking information, according to this study.

Researchers developed and tested an app called Purple Robot. It uses multiple sensors in the mobile phone to gather data about location, phone usage, movement and other activities to assess if the mobile phone user is indeed depressed.

According to Sohrob Saeb, Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine’s postdoctoral researcher and one of the Purple Robot developers, the main purpose of developing the app was to see if they could passively and objectively identify if people had depression. Read the rest of this entry »

GPS turns 20. Last month, clear across the globe, millions of people who are directionally-challenged celebrating its 20th anniversary.

The US Air Force made an official announcement on July 17, 1995, that the Global Positioning System was at full operational capacity. People who were prone to getting lost were undoubtedly grateful.

GPS tracking is an advancement that has become so embedded in our daily lives that it is a bit weird to think of it as being only 20 years old. It really feels as though GPS has been with us forever and is everywhere around us.

It kind of is, actually. There are four billion devices that are all locking on to our 24 solar-powered satellites, not to mention the five or more spares. It takes this many to offer us blanket coverage around the earth and make sure that signals will be received at any given point from four different satellites. Read the rest of this entry »

Many fleet businesses for years have been considering running a greener fleet. Among the first to embrace a stiff emissions goal was the state of California. However, other states may soon follow along. One particular question that fleet managers are likely to ask is what the first step is that they will need to take toward running a fleet that is more environmentally friendly. The simple answer: GPS fleet management.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, things like heavy trucks, light trucks, construction machines, garden and lawn equipment and other parts of the transportation sector is presently responsible for around 27 percent of all United States greenhouse gas emissions. This averages to over 1800 million metric tons of harmful emissions and carbon dioxide being pumped out each year of fleet vehicles.

Below are five ways that your business can produce a greener fleet through GPS fleet management. Read the rest of this entry »

Document shredding companies provide an important service to businesses of all shapes and sizes. GPS fleet tracking systems offer many benefits to document shredding companies. These are just a few reasons your document shredding business might want to consider bringing GPS tracking into the fold.

Document Security

Because of federal privacy laws, the security involved in document shredding is more important for some businesses, than others. Savvy shredding services, though, can offer the same security to all document shredding customers thanks to the advanced technology used by modern GPS fleet tracking systems.

More specifically to the ability to use RFID tracking to follow the progress of specific document loads and confirm that they never deviated from their anticipated paths. This is especially important for businesses that handle legal, financial, and medical documentation.

From pharmacies that handle prescriptions for medication and insurance documentation to hospitals that generate copious amounts of medical data to serve their communities. You can offer the ability for them to track their documents through RRID transmissions to ensure that security. Read the rest of this entry »

A study which looked at Australian fur seals located in the Bass Strait and their feeding behavior found that things like pipelines, shipwrecks, and cables benefited these animals in their underwater world.

What researchers found was that these types of structures were actually acting as artificial reefs and attracted fish and various other marine life. Because of this, hungry fur seals get their fair share of a variety of squid, bony fish, and octopus.

The study’s underwater ‘seal-cam’ footage and GPS tracking data revealed that the Kanowna Island colony animals which were off Wilsons Promontory favored certain foraging routes.

Deakin University’s John Arnould stated, “In one case we looked at the GPS track and it was a straight line, which made us think that the seal might be following fishing vessel”.

The researchers, on closer inspection, realized there were other things at play; the foraging path of the animals mirrored a pipeline and other animals were doing the exact same thing.

The Bass Strait’s underwater infrastructure includes communications cables, the Basslink high-voltage power pipeline and numerous wells and shipwrecks. Read the rest of this entry »