4 ms·

There is an application for these devices if they are implemented securely: Adults with dementia or significant cognitive decline who wander and get lost.

aoro 7y ago
By that logic pets and livestock as well, but I'm sure this exists already.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Pets frequently have implanted microchips, but for identification purposes, not live tracking. I suspect folks offer GPS trackers for pets already. Lifestock you can typically afford to lose a couple of.
  - samatman 7y ago
    "afford" is relative. If a tracker is cheaper than the expected loss value (replacement value X percent chance of losing an animal), it makes sense to track.
- coreymatyas 7y ago
  There are a handful of products for pets at least. I'm personally familiar with Whistle. It's collar-mounted, works fairly well for a large dog in a rural area despite spotty cell coverage (which the software doesn't handle terribly gracefully). Amusingly, the monthly subscription is only a third the price of the product in the OP. For livestock to be a viable market, the monthly subscription would have to go down substantially. In the US, your large market segments are poultry, pork, and cattle. Chickens just aren't worth enough. Hogs are $75-150 live (with thin profit margins) and are a pain to catch, though I'm not familiar with escape rates in commercial operations. Cattle are worth 10x that and do escape occasionally, but they're not terribly difficult to find nor catch. Perhaps there's a market for tracking hogs for small farms and cattle for commercial grazing operations, but I'd be surprised if tech could do much to disrupt the existing low-cost solution: ear tagging and a phone call when your neighbors/police find a cow on the road.
cpach 7y ago
I agree. A person with dementia going out and then getting lost when it’s -15℃ outside is possibly lethal.
praptak 7y ago
Tracking is better than nothing but they should not roam unaccompanied anyway.
- Forbo 7y ago
  This assumes that you can afford supervised care. One of these devices is going to be cheaper than that kind of care, especially depending on how long you would need to maintain the supervision.
wuliwong 7y ago
I try to limit the times I am painting with such a wide brush as to categorize the output of an entire county but in the case of technology coming out of China, isn't it almost guaranteed to be "insecure"? I am saying insecure in the sense that there is no doubt that the Chinese government has access to whatever data in TikTok they want. I am admittedly out of my depth on detailed discussions about security but I believe this is basically the situation in China. Maybe you could argue that it is effectively the same in the United States but I'm not sure.
- Digit-Al 7y ago
  It depends on your threat model. There are certain types of information that would be of interest to the Chinese government, and you would, indeed, be unwise to use any services that are under the purview of the Chinese government to store or transmit such information. Whether such services would be perverted by the Chinese government is a whole other discussion of course. However, I don't think anyone but the most rabid sinophobe would accuse the Chinese government of wanting to abduct our children.
howard941 7y ago
For that use case the thing needs a secure bracelet because the person wearing it will forget or question the need for it and remove the device. But a secure bracelet is a dangerous safety hazard.
djsumdog 7y ago
They only way to implement this securely is if the stuff is self hosted. You setup a device in your home that can open up a port via uPNP, the watch connects directly to the device using a shared set of keys that never goes to a central server, and all the code on the watch and home server are open source and they are setup by default for regular, automatic, signed updates. There can still be security issues in this situation, but if enough people use it and hack on it, they have a better chance of getting fixed quickly. The trouble is, this type of setup is a nightmare to implement. Home routers today still make this incredibly difficult. Most people would just get frustrated and prefer something that has a central server, with closed source garbage, that seems to do everything for you. Plus there's more money to be made if you can collect all that customer data.

aoro 7y ago

By that logic pets and livestock as well, but I'm sure this exists already.

ceejayoz 7y ago
Pets frequently have implanted microchips, but for identification purposes, not live tracking. I suspect folks offer GPS trackers for pets already. Lifestock you can typically afford to lose a couple of.
- samatman 7y ago
  "afford" is relative. If a tracker is cheaper than the expected loss value (replacement value X percent chance of losing an animal), it makes sense to track.
coreymatyas 7y ago
There are a handful of products for pets at least. I'm personally familiar with Whistle. It's collar-mounted, works fairly well for a large dog in a rural area despite spotty cell coverage (which the software doesn't handle terribly gracefully). Amusingly, the monthly subscription is only a third the price of the product in the OP. For livestock to be a viable market, the monthly subscription would have to go down substantially. In the US, your large market segments are poultry, pork, and cattle. Chickens just aren't worth enough. Hogs are $75-150 live (with thin profit margins) and are a pain to catch, though I'm not familiar with escape rates in commercial operations. Cattle are worth 10x that and do escape occasionally, but they're not terribly difficult to find nor catch. Perhaps there's a market for tracking hogs for small farms and cattle for commercial grazing operations, but I'd be surprised if tech could do much to disrupt the existing low-cost solution: ear tagging and a phone call when your neighbors/police find a cow on the road.

cpach 7y ago

I agree. A person with dementia going out and then getting lost when it’s -15℃ outside is possibly lethal.

praptak 7y ago

Tracking is better than nothing but they should not roam unaccompanied anyway.

Forbo 7y ago
This assumes that you can afford supervised care. One of these devices is going to be cheaper than that kind of care, especially depending on how long you would need to maintain the supervision.

wuliwong 7y ago

I try to limit the times I am painting with such a wide brush as to categorize the output of an entire county but in the case of technology coming out of China, isn't it almost guaranteed to be "insecure"? I am saying insecure in the sense that there is no doubt that the Chinese government has access to whatever data in TikTok they want. I am admittedly out of my depth on detailed discussions about security but I believe this is basically the situation in China. Maybe you could argue that it is effectively the same in the United States but I'm not sure.

Digit-Al 7y ago
It depends on your threat model. There are certain types of information that would be of interest to the Chinese government, and you would, indeed, be unwise to use any services that are under the purview of the Chinese government to store or transmit such information. Whether such services would be perverted by the Chinese government is a whole other discussion of course. However, I don't think anyone but the most rabid sinophobe would accuse the Chinese government of wanting to abduct our children.

howard941 7y ago

For that use case the thing needs a secure bracelet because the person wearing it will forget or question the need for it and remove the device. But a secure bracelet is a dangerous safety hazard.

djsumdog 7y ago

They only way to implement this securely is if the stuff is self hosted. You setup a device in your home that can open up a port via uPNP, the watch connects directly to the device using a shared set of keys that never goes to a central server, and all the code on the watch and home server are open source and they are setup by default for regular, automatic, signed updates. There can still be security issues in this situation, but if enough people use it and hack on it, they have a better chance of getting fixed quickly. The trouble is, this type of setup is a nightmare to implement. Home routers today still make this incredibly difficult. Most people would just get frustrated and prefer something that has a central server, with closed source garbage, that seems to do everything for you. Plus there's more money to be made if you can collect all that customer data.