Some location technologies will likely impact health care sooner than others. There are obstacles to the kind of future that Ahier and Scrimshire describe. Ahier, for example, says that GPS signals on phones vary too much in accuracy today. And the iPhone is too proprietary for many corporations to build on top of. “Almost all the doctors have iPhones, too,” he says. “Even if we give them BlackBerries, they go out and buy their own iPhones.”

“Ultimately, I think we’re going to need to be platform independent, even device independent,” Ahier argues. “We’re going to need to be able to use an Ubuntu netbook, an iPad, etc. Our EHR (electronic health records) are going to have to run on all those.”

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