Fade to Play

For people that have difficulty remembering to take their medicine, researchers are working on a method that if successful will enable an artificial tooth to release medication according to this BBC article.

The device is fitted with two sensors. The first is a fill-level sensor that measures the concentration of the drug in the reservoir.

It alerts the patient when the concentration of the drug falls below a certain level. At the moment enough medication can be contained for up to two weeks.

The second sensor monitors how much drug solution has been administered and a remote control allows the doctor to increase the dose of medication if necessary.

Relevance: I wonder what types of drugs would work best with this device and which would be less effective?

So Saturday night I said goodbye to my friends both new and old at Northern Voice and headed to Starbucks to do some work. This was a mistake. I felt awful. My head was hurting, my nose was stuffed, and concentrating on anything was incredibly difficult. I went home and slept for the next 12 hours. Unfortunately waking up didn’t make life any easier. I lay in bed for the rest of the day too sick even to make to the dining hall for dinner. After another restless night, I finally left my bed Monday afternoon to go work out at the gym. I am now have a cold and all the medication I’m taking isn’t working as well as it should.

I thought I was alone in my pain. That maybe my immune system was all messed up. But, thanks to the blogosphere (darren via Brian), I learned that this _moose flu_ infected at least 20 people.

In spite of all this, I loved Northern Voice this year. It rocked. It helped that it was on campus and in the most beautiful building on campus. I can’t wait to go again next year.

I just presented at moosecamp about Facebook. I thought it went alot better than my presentation last year. What was unusual is the for some strange reason my facebook interface became text based for some strange reason. Luckily that Cyprien was there to not only provide his laptop but he also assisted me by demoing the different features of Facebook as I spoke. The demo demons tried to strike me down, but failed.

thanks Cyprien.

I am attending moosecamp/northern voice for the second year in a row. It is a blogging/digital spaces conference and I really enjoy the community that is here.

I will be posting photos on flickr later.

For moosecamp today I will be running a discussion group/chat session about facebook, a social networking site primarily used by students (e.g. What is going on there? What is it about?).

Relevance: What can I learn from bloggers that is of relevance to my research? What can I learn from this community to help me better understand digital spaces such as facebook?

For the last couple of days I’ve noticed that people are having difficulty viewing my blog directly in both IE and firefox. I have contacted my blog host and I hope to have the situation resolved soon. Until then please use a blog reader such as feedburner or google reader.

Update: Thanks to Scott Nelson for telling me to change my PHP version on my dreamhost account.  I’m really glad I’m here at moosecamp.

This recent BBC article discuss how mobile phone technology is being used to assist citizens in developing countries solve everyday problems.

It is thought that mobile phones could become virtual bank accounts, being used to send, receive and save money.

M-banking, as it is known, might help to serve the three billion people who currently have no access to financial services, according to the World Bank.

“Most of those three billion people don’t have a safe place to save money. What ultimately gets people out poverty, and prevents them from being vulnerable to crises, is when they have a nest egg to fall back on”, says Gautam Ivatury, head of technology at Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a division of the World Bank that is promoting m-banking service trials from Mongolia to Pakistan.

CGAP is helping the development of services that will allow workers to send money to support their families in rural areas, by mobile phone.

Mr Ivatury says many Zimbabweans working in South Africa lose as much as half the amount they take home to their families in bribes at security checkpoints.

M-banking would allow them to send money safely from their mobile phones to those of their families, who would be able to redeem cash from mobile airtime sellers where they live.

Already a Vodafone affiliate, mobile operator Safaricom, has tested a service called M-PESA in Kenya with various partners, including the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).

Relevance: An example of how development agencies and concerned companies are creating programs for people in developing countries to help themselves using mobile phone technology.

This morning while reading this CBC News article over breakfast, I thought about how cool it would be to have breakfast with my parents once a week although they live over 5000 kms away. It is about a prototype called The Virtual Family Dinner which enable family members to eat dinner and see each other using a flat screen tv and two videocameras.

Because the device is meant for people who may not be familiar with such technology, Accenture researchers have made it highly automated. Built-in software monitors the images from the cameras, and when it detects that the kitchen’s occupant is putting food on the table, the system goes through a list of contacts, trying to reach each in turn until it finds one who is available for a dinnertime chat.

That’s the difference between this system and setting up a dinnertime videoconference using ordinary computers or laptops equipped with webcams. “Grandma doesn’t have to do anything,” Dadong Wan, the Accenture senior researcher who developed the prototype, said. While existing personal computing gear could do the job, he believes it requires a level of comfort with technology and willingness to make an effort that many people don’t have.

So as Mom puts her dinner on the table in Ontario, the system might automatically check to see if her son in Calgary is available. If he hasn’t arrived home from work yet, it would try her daughter in Halifax. Other family members could be on the list as well.

Rather than requiring those it calls to be in their kitchens, the system could alert them via telephone or cellphone.

Relevance: From a usability perspective, I like how simple the system is and it would be great to find out about their usability testing with techno-neophytes whether 85yrs or 25yrs. Also, I am wondering about the sense of presence felt by the person far away and about how much lag there is in the system. Is conversation possible? I know I would be much more conscious of what I was eating if my parents were watching.

Image: MARK RICHARDS (Gordon Bell portrait); PHOTOCOMPOSITION BY JANA BRENNING

In next month’s Scientific American there is an article by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell about Gordon’s MyLifeBits project at Microsoft in which he creates a permanent record of all aspects of his daily life.

Our research project, called MyLifeBits, has provided some of the tools needed to compile a lifelong digital archive. We have found that digital memories allow one to vividly relive an event with sounds and images, enhancing personal reflection in much the same way that the Internet has aided scientific investigations. Every word one has ever read, whether in an e-mail, an electronic document or on a Web site, can be found again with just a few keystrokes. Computers can analyze digital memories to help with time management, pointing out when you are not spending enough time on your highest priorities. Your locations can be logged at regular intervals, producing animated maps that trace your peregrinations. Perhaps most important, digital memories can enable all people to tell their life stories to their descendants in a compelling, detailed fashion that until now has been reserved solely for the rich and famous.

Relevance: What aspects of your life would you want to keep a record of and then relive? Maybe the last time you saw your best friend from grade 8 before they moved away? Or to hear the sounds of your last night at summer camp? In some sense, I am keeping a record of my life which is permanent through the online locations where I store information of relevance to me. I use my blog to store thoughts and content of relevance to my research, my flickr account to store photos, my del.icio.us site to keep my URLs found, and save alot of emails via gmail. I like how I am able to look back at aspects of my life and I know I would feel very lost if somehow all my digital photos disappeared.

At a San Francisco hospital, nurses will soon be using Tablet PC (called C5) to assist with patient care according to this CNET article.

Nurses at UCSF and other hospitals around the country currently measure a patient’s vital signs with one medical device. But they have to manually transfer the data to one of several rolling notebook PCs–referred to as COWs, or computers on wheels–so it can be captured in a patient’s medical history file and made available to other doctors.

This low-tech approach can lead to transcription errors by fatigued nurses and potentially serious medical problems for patients, said Ann Williamson, nursing director at UCSF. The C5 is directly connected to the other medical equipment used to take a patient’s pulse or measure their blood pressure, so data is instantly recorded by the C5 directly off the medical device and transferred to a hospital server.

This also allows nurses to spend more time with patients, because they don’t have to leave the patient to find the nearest COW or deal with having to log in to the shared COW every time, Williamson said.

As noted in one of the comments, a Jan/Feb 2005 Washington Monthly article entitled “The Best Care Anywhere” about veterans hospitals attributed these laptops on wheels being beneficial to patient and helping improve the profitability and quality of care to one of the best of the USA.

In the old days, pharmacists did their best to decipher doctors’ handwritten prescription orders, while nurses, she says, did their best to keep track of which patients should receive which medicines by shuffling 3-by-5 cards.

Today, by contrast, doctors enter their orders into their laptops. The computer system immediately checks any order against the patient’s records. If the doctors working with a patient have prescribed an inappropriate combination of medicines or overlooked the patient’s previous allergic reaction to a drug, the computer sends up a red flag. Later, when hospital pharmacists fill those prescriptions, the computer system generates a bar code that goes on the bottle or intravenous bag and registers what the medicine is, who it is for, when it should be administered, in what dose, and by whom.

Within the UK, a CNET article yesterday discussed the London clinic which is using WiFi in conjunction with wireless chip technology to be able to find/track items or even people throughout the hospital. There were apparently successful trials in December. I am curious as to how staff or even patients would feel being tracked?

Roberts said that workers will be able to view plans of the hospital on computer screens throughout the facility that show the location of items equipped with the chips, from syringe pumps to blood gas monitors.

The tracking system is due to be rolled out over the next few months, following successful trials in December.

Roberts also plans to find other ways to use the tracking technology to improve the experience of patients and to make medical workers’ jobs easier.

For instance, the system could be used to locate staff when equipment needs to be retrieved, to log when patients go in and out of surgery, or to guide outpatients to appointments via “intelligent” ID badges equipped with chips that show patients their location in the building.

Another possible application: tracking assets and staff as they move between the clinic and new sites it is opening in the Harley Street area.

Relevance: It is interesting how ubiquitous computing technology is progressing within the health profession. I wonder if mobile phones (perhaps with the ability to project on a wall) or PDAs will become more prevalent in the health profession rather than Tablets due to their weight and size? I also wonder how common mobile technology is within the Canadian health system?

Last month I was listening to the BBC World Service when they discussed a project called Botanicalls. You can hear an mp3 from that story on Rob Faludi’s blog, one of the 4 student teammembers behind Botanicalls.

Botanicalls allows thirsty plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the botanicalls network needs a lot or a little water, it can call a human and ask for exactly what it needs.

When humans phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics, including how they like to be watered and cared for. Call 212.202.8348 to hear more about each of the plants.

Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species cohabitation and understanding.

They present a really cool diagram of the process:

The goals of this project:

1. Keep the plants alive through an interdependent relationship with co-habiting humans by translating the communication protocols of the plants (leaf habit, color of foliage, droop, etc) to more common human communication protocols (email, voice phone calls, digital visualizations, etc). More than keeping individual plants alive, we want to keep the system and project alive.

2. Make a connection between people and plants. Explore/enhance/create/visualize people’s emotional connection to plants, the ways plants help humans, how caring for a shared resource can create sense of community, how natural life is a valuable counterpoint to our technical environment.

3. Gather data, create a complex and dynamic network, documentation for do-it-yourself style propagation of the project, record process.

Relevance: I think we have all heard about how in the near future our fridge will call us to tell us to buy more milk. I’m sure someone is working on that right now. Reading this, I think about what technologies I would want a distributed interaction with. As a student living in a residence, I would love an SMS message when the rinse cycle is running on my washing machine or when my dryer is done. I know I can estimate but I would like to be notified. I like this idea of a notification system, although rather than a call from my plant, I would prefer a text message to my mobile or email address. It would be less obtrusive.

Found via networked performance