E911 actually works, finds transplant patient at jazz festival
By Michael Caputo 
posted May 27th 2007 11:01PM
posted May 27th 2007 11:01PM
From listening to your phone calls to reading your text messages, Big Brother will always find a way to keep up to date with our lives. For a 10 year old boy from Pennsylvania who was waiting for a heart transplant, it was an indispensable technology that saved his life. While waiting for a phone call notifying him a donor had been found, they boy was out with his family and unreachable. Luckily for him, his mother had a Sprint celly and the authorities where able to locate them while at a local jazz festival using the phones integrated GPS. Soon after being located, the boy was rushed to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh where the surgery was a success.
come on engadget...this story was all over the news weeks ago!
Yankees368, well you should've posted it.. oh wait.. How about you start a website and call it "Thestuffengadgetmissed.com that way we can go to it and read the stories that fell through the crack. As for me, I didn't hear about this story, guess I should just go end this pathetic life :(
So uhhh... if they could locate the phone via GPS why couldn't they have called it?
While I appreciate the urgency of an organ transplant, did the family previously give consent for the authorities to track them down in such a manner? Personally (I'm certainly not up for receiving an organ donation ... that I'm aware of) I don't think I'd want any 'authorities' tracking down my whereabouts in real time without either my written permission in advance or a warrant!
-Pete
I doubt the transplant was needed too urgently, considering the fact that the family was at a jazz festival and not at the hospital by the kid's death bed or anything. As such, the whole "tracking them down with GPS instead of trying to call them normally or something", didn't really "save his life". If anything, it was the fact that they found an organ donor, and that he had a surgeon who was up to the task, that saved him.
dumbass, organs only stay alive for so long. Exact matches are hard to come by. Hence the urgency.
pete- the phone was off/not answering, they tried a bunch to call the mom I think, that is why they went that extra step to ask cops to help.
@pete
A Jazz festival is a pretty noisy environment. You must have an incredibly loud ringer if you can hear your phone ring at a concert.