Recently at an Intelligence Warfighting Summit in Tucson, Apple's military contractor Raytheon announced that they have an app that can track anyone and retrieve their live location on realtime maps, as well as providing secure communications. This app is called The One Force Tracker. This app could certainly be useful for anyone in any medical emergency or, specifically, any military emergency field. In most cases, the military will give technological advances to software companies such as Apple, but in this particular case, Apple actually created an idea that could be very beneficial to our military.
If a particular unit in the military was scheduled to be at a certain location at a certain time, this app would allow all other units to know their location and approximate time of arrival. There would be no more confusion or miscommunication's about where a certain military unit was located, because they could be tracked simply by clicking a button on your phone. This would also lessen the amount of tactical errors and misfires inside the military.
In order for this idea to follow thru and actually work, their would have to be certain changes made to the iPhone that would allow its battery life, and construction make up, to survive on the battlefield. Phone's would have to come equipped in a larger form with a heavier case to allow loner battery life, as well as a durable frame for the life of the phone. There has also been talk of sensors being placed inside the phones, so that they could serve other purposes. These purposes have not been disclosed at this time. One other thing that Apple would have to adjust is that the app would have to be able to multi-task with other applications. Whereas now, one app can only be running at a time on the iPhone. This did not seem to be of much concern because underneath the iPhone is the Mac OS X operating system which is based on Unix, which would give them Unix multitasking as well.
This could be a great leap for our military technology, and a very beneficial tool for helping medical and emergency responders. The iPhone never ceases to amaze me!
