Parents should use GPS phones to track teens

PARENTS should use GPS facilities on their teens' mobile phones to make sure they do not stray from the straight and narrow.

As part of the study parents tailed 15 teenage girls, looked at the feasibility of using GPS-enabled mobiles to spy on them.
The girls were happy to take the phones with them wherever they went and did not seem to mind what their the study was doing.

The boffins carrying out the study did not hand information over to parents so it didn't matter we guess. Somehow the researchers hope to use the technology to study the health risks that teenagers typically face so that parents can knock any dodgy behaviour on the head.

Dr. Sarah Wiehe, the lead researcher on the study and an assistant professor of paediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis said that GPS-enabled mobiles helped understand where adolescents spend their time and what they're doing.

How much technology do you need to know they are slumping around shopping centres looking disaffected, we wonder.

Anyhow, she said that it was somehow possible to use the mobile to intervene right at the time when they are most likely to do something naughty like drink beer or smoke fags.

She seems to think that if a teen is likely to drink after school they could receive a timely text message that encourages healthy behaviour and they will listen to it.

Most teens would not do what they were told if they had a gun pointed at them, a timely SMS message is not going to stop them smoking. µ

L'Inq
New Zealand Herald