GLONASS as social service

Forming of Russia's Glonass satellite navigation system to complete on Sunday A Russian Proton-M   carrier rocket will deliver three Glonass-M satellites into the orbit on Sunday, completing the forming of the global navigation system, a representative of Russian space agency Roscosmos has said. The rocket will blast off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan at 03:25pm local time (10:25 GMT), he said.Glonass is the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Global Positioning System, or GPS, and is designed for both military and civilian use. Both systems allow users to determine their positions to within a few meters.  Russia currently has a total of 26 Glonass satellites in orbit, but three of them are not operational. The three Glonass-M satellites to be put into orbit on Sunday will allow Russia to operate a complete Glonass network of 24 operational satellites and have several satellites in reserve. The three satellites are planned to be put into operation in about 6 weeks.

GLONASS as social service

Russia’ Public Chamber has considered the Social GLONASS project, aimed at using the national satellite navigation system GLONASS for the improvement of social life in Russia.The navigator, a device in the shape of a small box, is able to bring significant changes into the lives of millions of disabled people. Thanks to the Social GLONASS project, it will be possible to conduct constant monitoring of the health status of disabled people with the help of navigators. These people will always be in constant contact with their attending doctors, social workers and relatives.The navigator will help people with poor eyesight to get around and won’t let them get lost. And even if someone gets lost it won’t be difficult to find him not only in the city, but also in the forest. The authors of the Social GLONASS project are confident that many parents would like to use navigators to control their children’s whereabouts. According to the Senior designer of GLONASS Yury Urlichich, the company is paying particular attention to the design of navigators for children.

We are developing a number of models for shoes and clothes. You can insert a navigator sensor in a child’s sport shoe and then track his route via the internet.Of course, Social GLONASS is not only about navigators for children and disabled people. It is clear that disabled people may need help not only in the street but also inside a building, in the underpass and in the metro, where there is no reception for satellite signals. The Social GLONASS envisages the establishment of an integrated telecommunication network with special response centers. These centers will receive signals from very different wireless devices. The competitiveness of different systems will enable identifying the location of a person with higher accuracy, the designer says. "Next year we hope to achieve the accuracy of about 2.8 meter and we expect that from 2012, when the next stage of the federal target program GLONASS starts, our clients will tell us the accuracies they need. By 2020, technically, we will be able to ensure accuracy within tens of centimeters.  If we add local navigation systems, this will be reduced to centimeters."

This will be more than enough for people with poor eyesight. The key thing is that the decision for the development of the Social GLONASS program should be made at the governmental level. It should be noted that in other countries, GPS devices are gradually being introduced into public life. Recently, tens of thousands of Europeans who suffer from Alzheimers disease received personal navigators. In Japan, navigators are handed to schoolchildren. However, these are only some of the components of a social satellite network, which are not even comparable in scale with the plans of the Social GLONASS, Urlichich says.  "There is no analogue in the world to our integrated telecommunication network project and we want it to emerge first of all in our country." In the near future the creators of Social GLONASS will officially present their project to the public, in order to receive feedback from citizens. The enhanced version of the project will be submitted to the Committee on Modernization and the Economic Development of Russia.  The project has all chances of becoming a social program especially in light of the recent state-of-the-nation address of President Dmitry Medvedev to the Federal Assembly, in which he pointed to the poor by developed infrastructure for disabled people in Russia.