cognitive prosthetic device for people who get disoriented in
environments, have memory problems, and/or trouble focusing on salient
parts of the environment.
I've been thinking something like this could help, for example, people
with alzheimers who may not be physically deprecit but who cannot, due
to mental problems, go out and enjoy life.
I think I posted about this here when I once made a post on tagging
everything and said that I read an article about Gorden Bell in a
recent issue of CACM in an article about LifeBits and research at
Microsoft.
That type of stuff could be excellently used for medical purposes, to
allow people to be mobile and functioning at a better level than now,
but the sad thing occured to me that most people would not be able to
afford it because the research is going on at very costly places--and
even were they to put out something, it wouldn't be properly modular
such as to allow for people to write their own, cheap or free,
adaptors to it because not only wouldn't it be designed easily for
such purposes, the API would probably be closes.
Not only that, what I might think of as the hardware API would also be
closed. So, I was thinking of this, and thinking that a group of
people could get together to work out some of these problems--the
sensors, hardware for locating people in an environment, &c. wouldn't
be as sexy and small as what a company with a lot of money could
accomplish, but it could probably accomplish things well enough.
The location in space to a high degree of accuracy such that a person
could be assisted with orienteering might not be good enough with GSM
(I haven't kept track of these things), but I know that other methods
could be used--wifi. And businesses and metro areas might be able to
place points around as a public service--they are already making free
wifi available to the public.
Anyway, I thought it was a neat idea, and was wondering if anyone had
already done it?
Oh, and I had this post stored as a draft for a while, but I was
reminded to actually send it due to an article in <interactions>
XIII.3. So, it's entirely plausible that people are working on this.
If anyone here is, I'd like to read about it.
<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1125864.1125880&coll=portal&dl=ACM&idx=1125864&part=periodical&WantType=periodical&title=interactions&CFID=71318471&CFTOKEN=94907795>
--
sheila
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