News

It's Tuesday morning; do you know the precise geographic co-ordinates of your children?

Researchers at Indiana University's school of medicine plan to use cellphones to track the movements of 160 14- to 16-year-old girls over the course of a year in an effort to better understand the connection between specific locations and bad behaviour.

"If we know there's an area of town where an adolescent girl is more likely to engage in some sort of risky behaviour, then we could potentially program those phones to deliver an intervention," Sarah Wiehe said.

The study, which will take place in Indianapolis, is scheduled to wrap up in 2010. It will compare the girls' geographic location with their reported activities, such as smoking and having sex.

Dr. Wiehe hopes to find out whether certain places lead to risk taking, or whether young people who engage in such behaviour gravitate toward specific locations.

Once a pattern is established, the phones will be used to contact the girls when they are approaching a place where they tend to misbehave, sending them a text message encouraging healthy behaviour or simply asking them what they are about to do.

Using cellphones with GPS to monitor teens is a bit like tagging wild animals to track their migration patterns, Dr. Wiehe admits, but stresses she has the participants' consent and information about what they do will not be shared with their parents or any other outside party.

Dr. Wiehe said she worries about how honest the girls will be about their behaviour, but hopes the confidential nature of the research will encourage them to be forthcoming.

"We're very upfront with them about what we're doing and that the information will be kept private," she said. "But some of their friends still call it the 'cop phone.' "

GPS technology has become an important tool for researchers attempting to figure out the rituals of youth, she said, as it is able to provide a constant, accurate picture of where individuals spend their time. Other academics are using cellphones to study patterns in teenage physical activity, she said, and how teens interact with their urban environment.

"A lot of what kills us as begins between 9 and 18, but that's a time when you can't really observe those behaviours going on," she said.

Dr. Wiehe first experimented with using cellphones to track a group of just 15 girls, curious whether they would actually keep the phones with them constantly. They did, and the success of her findings, which were published in the latest issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, led to funding for the larger study.

The key to the program's success, she believes, is the cellphones serve as both recording device and reward. Each participant is given unlimited text messaging on the phones, providing an incentive to keep the gadget close at hand.

But using GPS to monitor anyone's movements raises concerns about privacy. Dr. Wiehe said that although the subjects were repeatedly reminded that the phones would be used to track their location, many girls were surprised by how accurately the GPS could trace their movements.

"There were some cases where they actually screamed because they couldn't believe how well it tracked them."

Since she first began experimenting with cellphones in her research, Dr. Wiehe said, she has been shocked at how quickly commercial parties have embraced the idea of GPS monitoring.

Many cellphone companies promote "geo-fencing," a service that notifies parents when their child approaches physical locations they have tagged, such as a boyfriend's house or a dangerous neighbourhood.

"This is a very powerful tool and I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg," Dr. Wiehe said. "But I think there's going to be a lot of ethical issues that we're going to have to deal with along the way."