Hi Plug, I was browsing facebook today because my family has recently decided to use it in place of actually talking to eachother (not that we ever did much of that before).
As I was catching up with relatives I had the sad realization that my Mother, who is in her 80s, doesn't participate and because of this she's been left out of the loop. She has a 50Mbs fiber optic line and an N wireless router, courtesy of Utopia and uses it about once a week to download a book onto her nook simple touch. This has me thinking; Why hasn't anyone come up with a dedicated device that could be used for elderly and shut in older folks to communicate with their loved ones? I'm not talking about a tablet that can do everything like an iPad or even a nook color, I just mean a dedicated device that only does facebook (yeeech), or some other similar service. I mean what would be involved in taking a cheap tablet device, locking it down or at least optimizing the UI for something like that? A simple touchscreen menu with big pictures of all the kids & grandkids, touch one and see what they've been up to. Press another button and record a little video, or start a video chat? Something like that seems so obvious that I can't believe it doesn't exist and I really wonder why this avenue hasn't been explored. I love my mother, but she is the most technically illiterate person on earth and believe me, I've tried for years to get her to "learn computers". The only reason she has the nook simple touch is because we went for a walk by barnes and noble last year and she was mentioning how she would love to start reading books again, but her eyes are getting bad. A salesman overhead that and 20 minutes later she had bought a nook and library of congress to go with it (being able to scale the text up and down with a press of a button is a feature she really loves). Am I onto something new, or does anyone know of a device or service matching what I'm talking about here? /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
