Another type of wearable technology comes in the form of a watch (pictured below), but it's use is far greater. It measures a person's stress level through several sensors that gather information about the user and the environment. It will ask questions and transmit answers to a central computer to reveal correlations between environmental factors that may increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. This study is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. With using technology to study humans, are we going to be able to answer the question: what causes certain health problems? Is it worth the money if it helps us to live longer, or is it pointless because of how badly we treat our bodies anyway? How far is technology going to go in saving our lives?
How about transforming a phone to becoming "an angel on your shoulder?" Alex Kass and his team from the Accenture Technology Lab in Palo Alto, California is working on the Mobile Personal Services platform (the angel) "capable of running a number of personal coaching applications to help someone be more effective both at home and on the job." The first module has been designed for salespeople as they interact with co-workers or sales contacts. The salespeople wear a handset in combination with wearable sensors and a personal area network employing Blue tooth, as well as connecting to servers to do the heavy analytics lifting. With technology doing the work for us, are people going to be as smart 100 years from now as they are today, or is technology just going to destroy our minds? Will we even have to think in the future? The use of calculators has stopped several people from knowing how to do simple math. Is the advances of technology, such as "an angel on your shoulder" to find information for you, going to do the same thing in other area of our lives?
Pictures and information found at: http://www.redwoodhouse.com/wearable/ and http://www.wearitatwork.com/
It is wild to think that these computers can become a part of us. We are already so dependable on being able to travel with a computer, and now it will be made easy for us. This technology is amazing and will do wonders in the work force. Your question about people being as smart is a good one though. We are dependent on our informational systems to do work for us, and this may just make us more lazy.
ReplyDeleteThe wearable computer technology was mentioned last week but it was a cell phone watch. The advances in technology are unbelievable. If I can start talking to my computer instead of typing I do not know what I'll do. That video Dr. Drake showed in class was pretty cool; as it displayed the different interface technology. I do think that as technology makes things easier for us, we are going to become far to dependent upon it. Not that manual labor is a dream come true, I just do not want to see computer technology doing everything for us one day.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Spencer when he said, "I do think that as technology makes things easier for us, we are going to become far to dependent upon it". I'm thinking, if we are so dependent. What will happened when it fails? For example, they blackout in New York city, people didn't know what to do.
ReplyDeleteI went to the link you gave on more wearable projects, and there is some pretty neat stuff there. I really enjoyed the Teleglass T3-F Video Eyeglasses that let you watch a video in one eye while allowing you to watch where you are going or what you are doing with the other eye. Users feel like they are watching a screen from six feet away - how is this even possible? This makes me wonder though what all of these technological advances will do to our health. If it's not good to sit to close to the TV screen, what's it like to have a screen an inch away from your eye?
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think its awesome that we could wear things like this. I mean, in that video we watched in class with the guy who ran and was able to hear a voice talking to him because his watch notified him. That would be so cool to have that at our own expense and I would for sure test that out but that is nuts when you think about what is being created nowadays.
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