Researchers at Indiana University's school of medicine plan to use cellphones to track the movements of 160 14- to 16-year-old girls over the course of a year in an effort to better understand the connection between specific locations and bad behaviour.I'm not sure what they mean by "intervention"... maybe something akin to the electric shock collars you can get for training your dog not to stray off the property?
"If we know there's an area of town where an adolescent girl is more likely to engage in some sort of risky behaviour, then we could potentially program those phones to deliver an intervention," Sarah Wiehe said.
The study, which will take place in Indianapolis, is scheduled to wrap up in 2010. It will compare the girls' geographic location with their reported activities, such as smoking and having sex.Now, from what I seem to remember about my youngest sister's 'teenage antics'... somebody at Indiana U had better be working on a 'taser phone'.
Mrs. Neo suspects this may be a case of 'available technology' driving this particular course of research... pointing out that these devices will likely lack a "backseat alarm"... and suggests that researchers might want to start fine-tuning their "brain-reading hairband devices" instead.
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FROM THE COMMENTS:
"Been a long while since I was a teen, but from what I remember, the more a place was "out of bounds", the more popular it became."*
"Do they really want to draw, literally, a map for them?"