GPS continues is march into ubiquity with the integration of positioning technology into objects as innocuous as asthma inhalers.
Back in 1995, I worked a one-year internship at St. James University Hospital - one of Europe’s largest teaching hospitals - developing clinical software for neonatal infants and asthmatic children. In developing tools to help kids record asthmatic episodes, I was struck by the range of innocent causative factors - banana skins, carpeted flooring, upholstery - that could trigger an attack.
Our work largely focussed on recording patient histories after the fact - but what David Van Sickle’s experimental GPS-enabled inhalers allow, is for patients to capture the circumstances of their episode, at the time of occurence.
It isn’t difficult to see beyond this device to a point where using an inhaler could alert nearby first responders or family members in case of real distress, requiring medical assistance. Indeed, Apple’s recent preview of its iPhone 3.0 software was explicit in illustrating how the iPhone and iPod touch devices could control attached peripherals, notably Johnson & Johnson’s LifeScan glucose monitoring peripheral.
Both LifeScan and the inhaler represent two approaches to connected healthcare devices - LifeScan embeds itself within an existing communication platform and the inhaler embeds communication capability into the fabric of the device.
Read more at Cnet’s Disease detective plans GPS-enabled asthma inhaler.
The employment of cellphone cameras as lo-def medical imaging devices seems to be catching on. Hot on the heels of the bloodsucking Vampire Phone, I covered at the beginning of the year, come the CelloPhone and the CellScope.
Both devices are winners of Vodafone’s $600′000 Wireless Innovation prize and pioneers in the emerging field of telemicroscopy, turning a cellphone camera into a ‘clinical-quality light microscope that can transmit images of patient samples for remote diagnosis by healthcare professionals.
Both devices are being deployed across the developing world, in field trials, that will help determine whether lightweight equipment and remote diagnosis can help alleviate the limited resources of such communites.
CelloScope and Cellophone shre the same ability to ‘clip’ onto existing phone’s cameras, but where eCellScope utilised a directly captured optical image, Cellphone seeks to analyse the ’shadows’ of cells, which can indicate the presence of cells and bacteria.
The devices could be a boon to rural and less developed communities that lack sophisticated medical imaging equipment and also the skills to interpret images locally. Indeed, both devices can utilise MMS messages to request a diagnosis; some remote diagnosis are even performed by computer and returned as a text message!
Read more at SciDev.Net’s Mobile phone diagnosis approaches field trials…
Back in January 2008, I commented on the assasination of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto and how the government’s attempt to gloss over the incident was rapidly undone by SMS, mobile video, voice calls and photomessaging - collectively, Pakistanis had unwittingly crowdsourced enough evidence to overturn the government’s position. (read the full story here)
In recent weeks, and on a smaller scale, at London’s G20 summit, the death of Ian Tomlinson, an innocent bystander simply making his way home through the protest area became another infamous example of the state’s official line becoming undone by citizen media.
During the conference, the government chose to close down CCTV coverage in one of the most surveillance-dense cities in the world, paradoxically for security reasons. What civic leaders didn’t anticipate was the extent to which a massively distributed, and democratised citizen-owned surveillance system had taken its place. Tens of thousands of G20 protestors equipped with cellphones and digital cameras were able to document what CCTV was blind to….what Wired called Little Brother.
Tomlinson’s death was initially pinned on a massive heart attack and ‘natural causes’ - when the video footage came to light, it was shown that the unprovoked Tomlinson was beaten by a police officer.
The published by the Guardian newspaper and propogated through sites such as YouTube, led to the arrest of a police officer, later charged with manslaughter - Tomlinson’s postmortem indicated that an abdominal haemorrhage was the cause of death.
Like the story of Pakistan’s government and Bhutto’s assassination, the British authorities have had sunlight thrown on them by the distributed surveillance capabilities of their subjects. Britain is one of the most surveilled countries in the world - one of the consequences is that people are using consumer technologies, services and tools to scrutinise their rulers.
Almost two years ago, here on MM2.0, I suggested that Twitter was perhaps a communications multiplexer, providing an enabling infrastructure for machine-2-machine communications that had hitherto, simply not existed.
A couple years later and we’re seeing a groundswell of experimentation in this area. A couple of great examples include…
A Twitter-enabled cat flap - that invokes a Twitter message each time the homeowners cats enters or exits their home. The cars are equipped with RFID tags that ensure only they can use the door! Is Twitter giving a new voice to an old species? This isn’t too dissimilar to the Botanicalls project, covered by MM2.0 at the beginning of last year…
BakerTweet 
enables bakers to keep customers informed about the freshness of their products by Twittering a public message each time a new batch of baked goods is nearing readiness. The service consists of a durable, hygenic device that’s installed into a kitchen - bakers then list their items at an online account that configures the box. They then simple need to hit an item selector on the box and push a button to Twitter the message. It’s not difficult to envisage appliances sending this message themselves as appropriate data comes in…. watch a video of BakerTweet in action.
A confluence of cheap electronics kits such as the Arduino, coupled with the mobile+broadband messaging bus that is Twitter is giving voice to the objects around us. Bruce Sterling’s spimes and Julian Bleecker’s blogjects.
With the recent spate of seaborne piracy in the Horn of Africa, it’s not surprise that cargo companies are taking technological measures to enhance the security of their goods.
Korea’s Hyundai Merchant Marine is now offering to supply the location of its cargo, in real time, by SMS - from the point at which a container is loaded until its delivery to the final recipient. In essence, this is the embodiment of Bruce Sterling’s Spimes - devices that through pervasive GPS and RFID, can track its history of use an dinteract with the world.
Hyundai’s system displaces email and fax communication which would ordinarily signal the status of an item.
Ultimately, insurance companies might insist on the ‘trackability’ of shipped goods in order to mitigate their own risks of piracy. Of course, Somali pirates are just as likely to employ this service against itself, by bribing port authority officials to signal the departure time of boats to pirates-in-waiting…
This year’s ETech 2009 seemed to have a unique focus on mobile and locative analytics - I’ve already covered Path Intelligence’s work on Measuring Offline Reality and there was an intriguing session from Molly Steenson on the ethnographics of shared phones in urban India.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing takes on this area was Tony Jabra’s Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviour of Places and People and the work of SenseNetworks in ‘indexing the real world’ using location data.
The data is drawn from cellphones and taxi GPS units, then rendered to a ‘heat map’ showing the most vibrant parts of a city. Recent feature additions not only show this vibrancy, but also seeks to find where people with similar movement patterns might be; acting as a civic-scale, locative collaborative filter.
This kind of predictive technology could be a boon to advertisers and marketeers - reaching people by understanding their intentional behaviors. Indeed, the analytical and predictive technology is so strong, the company asserts that it can calculate the probability of a subject visiting a particular type of location - such as a coffee shop.
Read recollections of Jabra’s talk from O’Reilly’s Robert Kaye and Quinn Norton.
ETech 2009 also saw MIT’s Nathan Eagle’s launch his txteagle ‘mobile crowdsourcing’ venture. Running on Kenya’s Safaricom network, txteagle enables users to earn small amounts of money or airtime for completing simple tasks, assigned to them by cellphone. Follow Eagle’s launch below…
A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 edition of O’Reilly’s flagship conference, ETech.
One of the more fascinating sessions was Sharon Biggar’s Sense and Sensibilities (What Happens When You Can Measure Our Offline Reality Like You Can the Online World?).
Biggar outlined the work of her company, Path Intelligence, in sensing radio signals from GSM phones to visualise the routes consumers take through airports, malls and other ‘high footfall’ public locations.
The session focussed less on the company’s pioneering Path Intelligence Explorer solutions, for clients, and more on underlying issues of privacy and anonymity. Biggar went to great lengths to describe the anonymity of data collected by the company, but also the view with which subjects responded to online and offline tracking, resulting in a series of ‘privacy principles’ that the company adhere to.
Biggar concluded that…
- Online businesses have a competitive advantage over offline due to their knowledge of user/shopper behaviour
- Technology changes are bringing online analytics to the offline world
- Sensing can collect information that traditional market research cannot provide
- But with the phenomenal power of new sensing techniques comes a responsibility to protect privacy
- Path Intelligence have four privacy principles that we follow and we would like to see these enshrined across the industry
- Our privacy principles are: OPEN – Open, Protect, Educate and Notify
It seems obvious really - no Bluetooth, infra-red or wifi - but a simple SMS as a data carrier for small items of information.
Contxts harnesses the ubiquity of SMS to enable users to share contact information and electronic business cards without worrying about common data formats or the availability of common connection protocols.
After joining the service and completing your contact information, users simply text the recipients number and a ’send’ command to a Contxts shortcode.
One of the happy intended consequences is the automatic and organic growth of a social network as contact information is shared, as well as a central repository for contacts.
The mechanisms for sharing are novel and quite universal, but are probably easily applied to existing address book services such as Plaxo, Gmail contacts and LinkedIn, raising questions about the longevity of the service.
It’s not difficult to envisage Contxts becoming a hub to these other services, or perhaps simply a feature that the bug guys simply add to wider address book and contact book services.
Something I’m beginning to love about the iPhone platform is the chance to revisit long-forgotten applications, breathing new life and mobility into software that’d otherwise disappear into history.
Earlier this month, Visuamobile’s Dominique Leca informed me of the launch of an iPhone edition of the ELIZA artificial intelligence algorithm, based on Joseph Weizenbaum’s work in the mid-60. ELIZA mimics a conversation with a psychotherapist by relfecting the patient’s words back at them in a kinda of pseudo-conversation that almost passes the Turing test!
Visualmobile’s Eliza AI, mimics the sparse command line interface of earlier incarnations and like it’s predecessors, is an amusing curio and marker in the history of artificial intelligence research.
To further deepend my nerd nostalgia, Conway’s Game of Life, is also now available for iPhone, developed by Alpheccar as LifeGame, a handheld simulation of ‘cellular automata‘.
Sadly, neither application has exploited the sensing, imaging, locative or mobile features of iPhone - it’d be interesting to see a crowdsourced Eliza (wait, is that Twitter?), or a Life algorithm driven by the proximity of other iPhone users.
Despite, this I’m holding out for EA’s upcoming iPhone edition of Wolfenstein - I’ve heard it’ll be an augmented reality played out in the real streets of your city ;)