Japan’s Ministry of Affairs and Communications (MIC) calls several projects starting in 2009 as part of the ICT Standard Development Project.
Among the three big categories [J], one of the 11 themes in the “Cyber District” operation is “Cellular phone Lifelog”, which targets to draw up the rules for time-space data utilization.
In particular, as proving tests, it is suggested to utilize cellular phone GPS data for pandemic prevention.
According to Asahi.com, which reports more detail than MIC’s release, this experiment involves around 2,000 cellphone users both in urban and rural towns. All monitors’ location are recorded in database with time information, then, by assuming one of them gets infected with disease, the system is supposed to track down the possible encounters on the same train and bus, then send an e-mail alert to those suspects’ cellphone.
