I need an idea person.

[DRU]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Can it be linked to location? How would it be different than a GPS? As a market researcher, I think it would be cool to put these on the bottoms of grocery carts or shopping baskets, or bribe shoppers to carry them around, to see what parts of a store produce the most visits and most time.

Absolutely it can be linked to location. It it would use GPS...not try to differ from it. We would just get a little GPS device to solder on to the Arduino board and then program it to output it's location. Then we'd build software (web-based or mobile apps, for example) that would listen for the signals of all the devices and show you where their current location is.

That is a pretty good idea, too. I've actually seen people doing what you said based on things like who all ahs "checked in" via Facebook or some other service. At large events, quite a few people do check in, and then they can be tracked via Facebook apps (or whatever service they're hooked up to) to see the highest traffic places at the show.

Building something to attach to shopping carts that does the same thing probably wouldn't be very difficult at all. We could track the entire shopping path of shoppers and provide data on all sorts of shopping habits.