“A London Ambulance crew was sent 200 miles to Manchester by a faulty GPS system while transferring a patient to hospital” reported many news sources yesterday. What is not known for us, developers and technical experts, that GPS are not %1000 reliable and there is always a percent of error even small.
While satellite images are always very reliable, computerized data are very reliable, stay one problem the data entered and read by human which introduce the human errors to the GPS systems.
I don’t blame the drivers for taking the patient 200 miles aways from his destination which is just at 12 miles, but I blame their managers for giving them GPS navigation systems without advanced courses to use such new technology, and without checking all hospitals data in that system.
I was working this week on a Glofish eten X500, one of the new Pocket PCs which have an integrated GPS system and faced many similar problems. First almost all professionals GPS mapping software try to guide you to find your destination : choose the city, then the street, then the address, if not you can use keyword to search your location, but never give you the possibility to enter GPS position manually ! Amazing but true, and I suppose the guys in the Ambulance have something similar in their hands.
This is not intelligence in my opinion, it’s called stupidity ! to remove a very basic feature for the reason of making proprietary data ? This is not all, even if this feature was available, a GPS user should know that there is many different geo location coordinates which might confuse a newbie. That’s why courses are important to give in such cases.
Moral of the story, if you build something that could be in direct relation with human life, try to make it the right way. This time the patient reached destination alive, but nobody knows what will happen in the future.
Read More :
BBC UK : Ambulance sent off course by GPS
