Professor Sir Ara Darzi, (not many notes… :)
Today, the complexity of healthcare has tremendous impact on people life’s. Technology is moving us from minimally invasive towards incision-less surgery.
Sir Darzi
There is a need for a more dynamic and personalized monitoring of patients, in particular the one who suffer from a long disease. If you can monitor them at their home environments we can avoid huge costs due to hospitalization and also prevent earlier needs for doctors. Wearable body sensor networks, allows you to compute directly “on the patient” diagnosis. There are progresses in MEMS that allows to create high-resolution monitoring stations, but there is still a need to power these devices.
Usage of home monitoring during post-operatory recovery, pervasive pH sensors and glucose sensors. Sensor integration concept: combination of wearable and ambient sensor.
Professor Jonathan Zittrain, who gave a very interesting talk (I didn’t really follow everything as it was through a videoconference), unfortunately I took only a few notes. In any case, I think I’ll jump on his latest book “The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It“, and advise you to do the same.
He started by showing us a set of crowd-sourcing solutions such as innocentive, livebox, or mechanical turk from Amazon, or the ESP game. The idea behind is that you can delegate boring or mechanic tasks to other parties, and humans will do whatever you want without knowing anything about why and for who, but just how much they get if they do the task.
There is something perverted behind that, as an idea of exploitation. “Could one really say that the one laptop per child project be a success if it is used by kids in Nigeria to solve porn website captchas all day long for some pennies?”
Microtransactions: the ability to cut task into small slices and be able to distribute them here and there that would require new methods for pricing…
Internet governance forum: taking a bunch of people to discuss on the future of the internet is not the best way to change things. Rather, it’s a small set of people who just start doing something (anything, but actually do it and stop just talking about it) that usually have the biggest impact.
Mr Adam Greenfield, gave a nice introduction to his vision depicted in his book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. There are many ubiquitous computing, not only one single type. Embedded in architectural place, wirelessly connected, imperceptible, multiple types of devices and services, post-GUI, deployed in everyday life, and vastly expanded “user” base. With the advent of the internet of things, a global “mnemotechnic” system, and the ways we interact with these techs are changing. Information processing (design) dissolves in behavior, Naoto Fukusawa (Muji’s idol designer). As an example of such dissolving behavior he discussed how girls “created” new physical interaction rituals to swipe their RFID Octopus card in HK.
Adam Greenfield
A class of systems that tends to colonize everyday life, like the example he quotes “denki toire” (EDIT: I’m not sure about the correct name of this things, please send me correct name or link) that analyzes our poo and transmits its over the internet (hopefully encrypted) to our doctor.
Everyware is can be engaged even without active conscious decision to do so. Unknowingness (I didn’t know), unwillingness (you have to do even if you didn’t want to do so).
Differential permissionning without effective recourse: it’s the sensor in the floor (physical access schemes), problems of authority: “who to ask for permission”. In everywhere the presence of one component may trigger functionality in another. Also, the notion of property becomes fuzzier (we don’t really know what devices belongs to who), and through this fading notion of property, the locus of control is obscured. We don’t really know why the system doesn’t work (what has caused the malfunction), and it is even harder to find about who to complain to when something is not working. Worse the system doesn’t present to ourself in a way that makes it easy to determine who are the stakeholders.
Most of the people in ubicomp are just building little components without even knowing they are actually all contributing to this global network of interconnected devices. What if people were actually aware of that?
We have to take everyware seriously, and here are five rules Adam proposes to implement when we design everyware:
- Default to harmlessness: concepts of risk and safety are very different across cultures. For example in Japan, there are many warnings everywhere, because they attach a strong importance to safety. Even if ubicomp system present themselves as harmless and neutral, there might not be so…
- Be self-disclosing: should be transparent to the user, seamfulness vs. seamlessness. People must know what data is being collected, so Adam and his wife design a set of logos that can be used to show people that everyware devices are present and they collect data (the problem with these signs is that they didn’t say what kind of data is being collected).
- Be conservative of face: should not be embarrassing for people to use them. No society could be totally transparent, as it wouldn’t work. Social status is also essential and depends on the cultures (eg. Japan where language itself encodes social status). The systems must be able to find hierarchies (who is responsible for what)
- Be conservative of time: don’t bother the user with useless questions if he doesn’t want to use the technology at that time.
- Be deniable: it should be possible to volunountarily opt-out, and not use the technology at anytime.
