You are walking down the street with a friend. A shot is
fired. The two of you duck behind the nearest cover and you pull out your
smartphone. A map of the neighborhood pops up on its screen with a large red
arrow pointing in the direction the shot came from.
A team of computer engineers from Vanderbilt University’s
Institute of Software Integrated Systems has made such a scenario possible by
developing an inexpensive hardware module and related software that can
transform an Android smartphone into a simple shooter location system. They
described the new system’s capabilities this month at the 12th Association for
Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks in Philadelphia.