By Peter Cochrane, 10 June 2008 17:31
COMMENT
Written on a rainy summer afternoon just four miles from my home in a local café with a free wi-fi service.
At a recent conference I was describing how mobile devices would become even more indispensable if fitted with an accelerometer and other sensors, when I was challenged.
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So I described how a mobile phone could be transformed into a pointing device. To dispel the evident scepticism, I recounted an experience of about two years ago when I saw the first mobile phone combining GSM with GPS, a compass, and an accelerometer.
When I stood in the street, the phone knew where I was and in which direction it was pointing. When flicked towards a building like the White House or the Washington Monument, it said so.
At the time I thought this could be the start of a development thread that could well be profound - and I still believe it is.
The ageing population in the West is going to need a lot of electronic support, and I suppose that will soon include me too.
So how about wearing a mobile phone that records your every movement? The behaviours recorded would represent a reasonably regular daily pattern.
Out of bed at 7am, walk to the kitchen for breakfast, read the newspaper, and go for a constitutional at 9am, visit a coffee shop at 10.15am, and so on through the day. I'm sure you get the idea.
What happens if you are not up and about as usual, and especially if you are not mobile in any way? Your alarm sounds.
If you don't respond, you get a phone call on your mobile, which is followed by one on your fixed line should you remain unresponsive. Ultimately a visit by a relative, neighbour or residential warden could be triggered.
Seems to me a really cheap solution that we could all easily afford. Should we wander off and get lost, or God forbid, have an accident or stroke, the alarm would be raised and we would be located quickly.
I would just ask the sceptics to mull this over and then try to imagine the additional implications for every profession and every industry.
Lone workers and people at physical risk spring to mind but then again so does the games industry. A mobile Wii would be really something, and so would air pressure and pollution measurements.
Comments
There are 7 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
"So how about wearing a mobile phone that records your every movement?"
And I thought ID cards and the NIR were bad - please don't let HM Government near this one.
It's a laudable aim to sound an alarm if the daily routine is deviated from and the subject is immobile.
However tracking movements is unnecessary. Just use a sensor that detects movement and if there isn't any for a predetermined period then call for help.
Just don't leave the device in a drawer when you go on holiday.
2. David Lucas
Karen Challinor:
So it should wait for a 'predetermined time' of no motion before raising the alarm....how long? 10 minutes? 20 minutes? So basically an ambulance response time or two then.
Recording motion and correlating with previous routines is a powerful method because it allows 'soft' inference techniques to be used, which are much more likely to give the correct answer than a simple binary time delay metric.
I think that the privacy issue is a red herring in this case. Protection schemes based on this technology would be opted into and operated by private companies regulated by the Data Protection Act.
Plus I'm sure a very strong point of the business case would be that the data chould be kept in an anonymised form and only interrogated by the algorithms doing the motion correlation.
3. Ian Sargent
How many people keep to the same routine day by day and week by week. How many false alarms would be generated because you've forgotten to reprogram it for a day's leave?
As a personal alaram this is a no-go for most of the population. There are so many variables that it would only really work for the housebound.
4. Peter Cochrane
Karen = When people get old and are at risk - it gets to be more about patterns. And I'm not suggesting that it is a compulsory thing - it is just another free facility we can choose to use or not! Peter
5. Peter Cochrane
David = Several things:
1) It is better than nothing - and that is what we have now
2) No system is ever perfect
3) It comes free with you phone
4) No home installation is required
5) It can totally automated
6) The user is in control
Not a bad set of plus points!
Peter
6. Peter Cochrane
Ian = Housebound, ill, limited in some way, infirm - that is exactly the audience. And for those who have completely 'lost it' we have the advantage of GPS too.
See previous comments also.
Peter
7. Graeme
Doesn't a similar facility exist for pacemakers - that is, an audible warning when the battery is about to die?