Berg: Family tracking services are becoming more popular

If you think that GPS on your phone is only used to find Starbucks, you are underestimating it. Today, more and more people in North America and Europe are using GPS and cellular networks to track the location of their families. Berg Insight predicts that the number of active users of location-based services for family members in these two regions will grow from 16 million in 2011 to 70 million in 2016, driven by smartphones.

Tracking the location of objects and assets is a big part of M2M (Internet of Things) applications, but tracking people is also becoming very important. According to Berg, companies are using these location services to track the location of employees. Doctors and medical institutions are using them to monitor the health status of patients. These monitoring areas are slowly expanding.

With the emergence of cheap family monitoring apps on smartphones, these monitoring systems, which were once used by specialized departments, have begun to enter the mainstream market. Almost all major mobile operators provide family location tracking services, and the growing number of companies such as Life360, Family Locator + and Family Tracker will further reduce the price of these services.