Usin’Life presented a concept of Pervasive computing and intelligent healthcare monitoring devices at the Maker Faire from Sept 23rd to Sept 24th in New York, NY and was awarded the BEST IN CLASS 2017.
The Wikipedia defines Pervasive Computing as “Embedding computational capability into everyday objects to make them effectively communicate and perform useful tasks”. The healthcare perspective is that objects around the house can be made intelligent and will silently monitor us without being obtrusive. These smart devices will only notify us if they spot a change. These devices will not only be clever but will also need to be made into beautiful objects that beautify your environment and serve a valuable aesthetic function too while being unobtrusive.
This is easy to understand with an example. Let’s imagine that we consider weight as an important parameter that sums up the general health of the person. We would like to measure the weight of the person regularly, say once a day. This is possible very easily today by asking the person to stand on a balance and record his weight. This weight then gets uploaded to the cloud someplace or it gets recorded in a diary that is monitored. However, this requires several steps. The balance needs to be placed somewhere that it is easy to use (as opposed to storage), the subjects needs to remember to take his weight everyday using some reminder strategy and made significant effort to record and manage his weight. Instead, imagine a weighing balance that is embedded in a chair and silently measures the weight everyday as the subject sits on it for your various activities. The balance silently records the weight and compares it from day to day. If, for instance, over a week period, the balance notices that the weight has been steadily decreasing and the subject has not been dieting, then the balance observes the change and believes that there is something amiss. It notifies the person that it has observed something unusual and then asks them to take action. It could also notify the caregiver or the family. Similarly, a refrigerator could monitor how you open the door. The speed at which you open, how long you keep it open and other parameters. However, if you start coming home drunk and then grab for more bottles inside the fridge, then your pattern changes subtly and you might swing on the door with more enthusiasm! This change if persistent, signifies a change and can get notified or recorded
For the Maker Faire, Usin’Life equipped a beautiful porcelain box with sensors to make it “smart”. This box could be a place where a person kept their keys or stored earrings or their watch. They typically, would use this box everyday as part of their activities for daily living. (ADL). This box served as a intelligent object that silently measured your activity of approaching the box with your hand.
The attendees were encouraged to reach for the box with their hand. The porcelain box measured the speed and the distance of the approaching hand and showed it to the participants.
However, at the Maker Faire the objective of the display was to also entertain the attendees and challenge them with sound and light. Thus, the distance of the hand was translated to a musical note and a tone was played dependent on the distance from the box. This distance of the hand from the box was also plotted on the screen with a red line on a real-time graph. To challenge the attendees, the computer drew a blue line that the participants were told to follow by moving their hand either towards the box or away from the box. The participants then got two cues to move their hand in response – the pitch of the sound and the blue line on the graph. Thus, this measured the reaction time of the attendees as well as ability to listen to sound cues. The complexity of the pattern that the participant was being challenged with could be changed and different attendees were given a chance to play with different music and graph challenges.
This simple porcelain box could be used to measure coordination ability, test cerebellar ataxia, alcohol based coordination ability, besides being a pervasive computing device