In an interesting demonstration of real-time monitoring, Apama participated in a recent study that was conducted by Radboud University as part of the Dutch "Four Days March". The march is an annual event in which tens of thousands of participants walk daily distances of 30-50 KMs for four days in succession. Unfortunately, past marches have had some unfortunate instances where participants have been overcome by heat - including a couple of deaths.
In a pilot study this year, volunteers took a pill embedded with an RFID chip and thermometer, which sent signals every 10 seconds to a Bluetooth-enabled GPS phone. The phone in turn sent the information to an implementation of Apama, which correlated the information about the volunteer, their temperature and their location, all plotted on an implementation of Google Maps. Leveraging the capabilities of Apama, monitors could track the progress of volunteers and identify those volunteers whose temperatures exceeded certain thresholds. And with the ability to correlate that information with the GPS data, they could tell where those volunteers were on the route, thus delivering a CEP-driven infrastructure for real-time monitoring and, if needed, a pre-emptive reaction to help somebody who might shortly be in distress.
In the image below, one can see the purple "pins", illustrating where on the route the volunteers are.
