Patent CA-2396997-A1 (CA)
Inventor: GRUSH BERNARD
IPC: G08G1/0969
Filed: 2002-08-07
Abstract: The present invention discloses a system and methods and processes to capture, filter and compress geometrically accurate, time-marked, paths (digital path maps or DPMs) taken by persons, animals, packages, vehicles or robots. These methods and processes can be stored and executed on small format devices for handheld, wearable, embeddable or implantable applications. This invention, often in conjunction with other processes operating on other technologies such as, but not limited to, personal computer or portal technologies, has realtime applications in military, paramilitary, exploration, remote sensing, wildlife studies, pet and livestock management, agriculture, surveying, large site inspection, parolee management, driver behavior modification, kid's safety, physical security, and certain classes of recreational and competitive sport.        Description Field of Invention This invention pertains to the science, practice and enablement of geo-spatial applications such as mapping, remote sensing and medium (cm, m) and large (km) scale movement monitoring or persons, animals, packages, vehicles, and robots ("carriers"). It has applications in military, paramilitary, exploration, remote sensing, wildlife studies, pet and livestock management, agriculture, surveying, large site inspection, parolee management, driver behavior modification, kid's safety, physical security, certain classes of recreational and competitive sport, among others.      Background of Invention In this description, "GPS"refers to any reliable positioning system, civilian or military, GPS, Galileo, Loran or other. Herein, GPS refers to any always reliable, always available, global positioning and timing service that anyone can use anywhere, in realtime.   There are numerous patents granted or filed that describe devices, methods and components to utilize GPS data to locate or deliver context and location specific information to a user of a GPS-enabled device. Such information may be related to travel (maps, directions, or suggestions), distance estimation (such as may be useful in navigation planning, realtime navigation, as well as surveying applications or playing golf), location-dependent advertising or other information. For these applications, the GPS device is largely a display device pre-loaded with maps, sometimes with the ability to place context related marks or annotations interactively. There are patents granted or filed that describe methods to annotate maps with waypoints, geomarks or other data as may be collected with GPS-enabled devices - examples include images or photographs for which the time and location of the capture of the data is useful. There are patents granted or filed that describe methods to locate such a GPS  device in relation to determining the correct spatial context to deliver location-specific information to that device. One distinguishing characteristics of the vast majority of these innovations is that the GPS-enabled devices involved are predominantly field-enabled displays bringing or contextualizing realtime information for the users of the devices. Another distinguishing characteristic of many other of these innovations is that the decision to record a location is triggered by the user of the device who may be annotating spatial information with activity-related events, reminders, requests for ancillary information, voice, image or other data. Another distinguishing characteristic of yet others of these innovations is to make GPS