Personal GPS tracking, what's in it for you?

It's evening and you and your partner are making your way home from work. How is that time organised? Who cooks? Who gets home first and what do you do? If you're like me, you probably just kick off your shoes, open a bottle, and crash on the sofa for half an hour before wondering about food. But sometimes my partner's not back for a while, and that time is wasted. I am actually trying to learn Spanish. If I'd known beforehand what time they would be back, maybe I could have used that time.

Many of us work this out by calling or texting our partner. Every evening. Not only does the cost of that add up, but it's inefficient. Half the time you can't get through anyway. Sure, it's nice to talk to our partners, but it's hardly quality time.

If you could see exactly where your partner is, onscreen, you'd know if they had left work, and you'd know how long it would be before they get home, and that gives you freedom.

What if you could receive a text to your phone every night when your partner gets within 30 minutes of home? That's enough time to put food together. In the meantime the time is yours. For what? You might relax. But you might also put that time to good use, maybe you could learn a language in that time.

There are loads of possibly small applications that add up to a big deal. If you run, you could take it with you so everyone knows you're all right. If you drive long distances you get SatNav for the journey but also your partner can see where you are. There's even an alert button so you can send a message saying you need help, but also, exactly where you are.

That GPS tracking and geofence technology is available now, and it's surprisingly affordable. You might even have everything you need barring the software, which is a £40 software download.

The key parts of the service that make this work are its accuracy and the fact that it's real-time.

You may have heard about mobile phone location services. If they are not based on GPS, then they are not accurate enough and nor are they real-time. They are good enough to verify that someone's in a town, but no better.

The service that makes all this work is from a company in Ireland called Blue Tree Services Ltd, and it's called KoolTrax.

KoolTrax means you can see onscreen the accurate (to 4 metres) location of the phone (person) you are tracking, in real time, along with a breadcrumb trail of where they've been.

It's a software download to the phone you want to track, but first you need a couple of things.

First, you'll need an Internet connected Windows PC to see the location of the phone. In addition, at the time of writing, KoolTrax only works on a device that's running Windows Mobile 5 or higher. You'll know if yours does because the screen will look similar to a normal Windows PC screen. There's a Symbian and a Java version in the pipeline though, and you can sign up to be notified when they are released.

Your phone will also need GPS capability, which it might already have or you may need to buy a BlueTooth or plug-in GPS adapter such as those sold by Holux for about £40.

Once you're all set up equipment-wise, download and install the software and you can set up geofence alerts and alerts to your hearts content. You can even see a breadcrumb trail that shows where the phone-owner's been for up to a month.

Our time is precious. If you can gain yourself some peace of mind and an extra half an hour a day just by knowing where your partner is and when they'll be home, that's valuable.

Alison York is an expert on personal GPS location devices. Nowadays the technology to allow others to see where you are and to track the location of others (for instance your kids or someone vulnerable in your care) has become affordable, and uses aren't by any means limited to the family, there are lots of business applications too, especially for lone workers. Alison is a consultant for a company in Ireland that develops and manufactures GPS tracking devices, Blue Tree Services Ltd.

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