NSF Award
9710667
This Small Business Innovative Research Phase II project from Signatron is focused on a novel radiolocation technology lowering the costs to the public of determining the location of cellular telephones which place emergency calls. The new technology involves a proprietary technique for collection of the calling phone signal parameters at two or more base stations which are then transmitted to a central computer for position computation. In Phase I, mathematical analysis and computer simulations were used to prove the technical feasibility of the technique. Not only was the technique shown to be feasible, but it was shown to be much more accurate and an order of magnitude less costly than the existing state of the art. In Phase II, a prototype system, comprising base stations linked to a central position location computer, will be integrated into a commercial cellular telephone system to further refine and evaluate the technology in field operation. Besides the important application to emergency cellular phone location (E911), this new technology will have a number of applications in other location based services for which current geolocation technologies are either ineffective or too expensive. Such services include location based billing for wireless telephones, locating fraudulent phone callers, vehicle fleet management, tracking of parolees, child location, location of wandering Alzheimer's disease patients, location of stolen vehicles, location of stolen equipment such as lap-top computers, and location of lost pets.
