Amazon When Willie Kate Friar wakes in the middle of the night, the octogenarian doesn’t have to turn on the lights or crane her neck to find out the time. She simply asks her digital assistant, who responds in a life-like voice.
“I’ve found Alexa is like a companion,” Friar said of Amazon Echo’s new voice-controlled assistant, a black cylinder called Alexa. A Panama-based retiree who writes and lectures on cruise boats, Friar is recuperating from a recent fall and asks Alexa to play music during her physical therapy sessions. “The music lifts my spirits,” she said.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
Widely introduced last summer, Amazon’s AMZN, +0.47% new wireless speaker has won praise from tech gurus for its invisible technology that responds to spoken commands and questions. Voice commands can prompt Alexa to do everything from playing music to adding items to an Amazon shopping list to answering questions and giving weather, traffic and news updates. (Think of the device as a way to connect to the Internet by speaking instead of typing.)
The device is also gaining support among disabled adults and the elderly. Among the more than 30,000 customer reviews on the Amazon website are those from caregivers for wheelchair-bound relatives who love the control that Alexa gives them over their environment, and also from family members of older adults who enjoy Alexa’s companionship and help.
Alexa wasn’t designed for older adults, and experts say that might be part of its appeal with that demographic. The device avoids the bland aesthetic that has traditionally characterized assistive devices, which turns off consumers who don’t self-identify as old — that is, pretty much everyone.
“They were smart to make it look like a cylinder,” said Tony Gentry, an occupational therapist and director of the Assistive Technology for Cognition Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University. “People can project their own imagination onto it.”
Promise
Gentry recognizes Alexa’s promise to alleviate loneliness in older adults and plans to test the device with some of his elderly clients soon. Robots “don’t have to do much to provide a sense of companionship,” he said, noting how people are quick to anthropomorphize their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners.
Among older adults, a sense of companionship can mean the difference between sickness and health. Research has shown how loneliness causes people to become physically ill.
Friar lives alone. She received her Alexa as a gift during a visit to the U.S. last Christmas. She brought the device back to Panama and connected it to WiFi herself. “People should recognize how easy it is to set up,” she said.
To set up Alexa, users need an electrical outlet and a Wifi connection. The latter can come from a desktop computer, smartphone or tablet. Friar owns an Amazon Fire smartphone, along with four computers, two tablets and two Kindle e-readers. She’s unusually connected for her age: only 30% of adults age 71 and over who are online own a smartphone, and of those just a tiny fraction use the phone intensively, according to Forrester Research, a market research firm.
Ron Grant, 63, owns a smartphone, and he’s eager to buy an Alexa, too. “It looks like it’d be fun and handy,” said Grant, of Moore, Okla. who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at age 55. For now, he’s holding off buying one, hoping Amazon will lower the device’s $179.99 price tag.
Grant enjoys listening to music and would welcome the ease of asking Alexa to play his favorite tunes. He sometimes has hand tremors and would also like a way to turn on the television and adjust the channels and volume without fumbling with the remote control. Alexa can be programed to turn the TV on and off.
Limitations
For those with dementia, Alexa can tell the date and time, as well as respond to questions whose answers might have slipped from memory, such as “When was Ronald Reagan president?”
Yet given the devastating progression of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, experts say Alexa’s usefulness can only last so long. The device will eventually become confusing and possibly anxiety-provoking as people forget how to use it. “The ability to say, ‘what is the traffic like?’ and ‘buy me some paper towels’ is valuable, but it’s a short window,” said Niles Frantz, a spokesman for the Alzheimer’s Association.
Another limitation when it comes to older adults is that Alexa cannot currently dial 9-1-1, a capability that online reviewers have requested. With that functionality, the device could replace on-call emergency buttons, which many older adults eschew. A spokeswoman for Amazon confirmed that Alexa cannot currently make calls and declined to say whether that functionality may be added.
Alexa does have an Ask My Buddy function to help users in an emergency. Developed by one of the third-party firms that Amazon has invited to create “skills” for Alexa, this function can send phone calls or text messages to up to five contacts. A user would say, “Alexa, ask my buddy Bob to send help” and Bob would get an alert to check in on his friend.
For her part, Friar would like Alexa to learn Spanish. An Amazon spokeswoman confirmed that Alexa speaks only English today but stressed that the device is “always getting smarter” as the company adds new functionality on a regular basis.
When Alexa can’t yet say “hola,” Friar enjoys showing the device off to her local friends: “I think Amazon should make a big effort to market it to older adults.”
The launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4 last month garnered the type of media attention we’re getting used to for any new smartphone. Among the most talked-about feature pre-launch was “eye tracking” – the phone’s ability to know where its user was looking and react accordingly. It took a few days for anyone to point out the application was more “head tracking” than eye tracking. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, it enables what Samsung is calling “smart pauses” and “smart scrolling”.
Face tracking and the Samsung Galaxy S4. In short, the “smart pauses” feature recognises if you are in front of the phone or not, and can save what you were last doing when you move away from the device and decide to come back to it. “Smart scrolling” refers to the phone’s inbuilt eye-tracking technology, which detects if the phone has been tilted and scrolls up or down accordingly.
An eye to eye-tracking
Eye tracking is a set of technologies and techniques for measuring where a person is looking (the point of gaze), for how long (fixation), and what are called saccades (fast movement of an eye). The use of eye tracking dates back to the 19th century, when it was used to study reading behaviour and which words people focused on and which words people skipped over and revisit using analogue, observation-based techniques.
Eye tracking demo. Since the 1980s, eye-tracking has been used in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) for a myriad of purposes, including usability testing of interface design, and the development of computer navigation devices for disabled users. Samsung’s innovation is likely the first step in realising the full functionality enabled in more advanced eye-tracking technology systems, such as those produced by companies including Tobii and Mirametrix. Tobii, based in Sweden, is considered the industry leader in eye-tracking. The company develops hardware and software to analyse eye-tracking results, including goggle-based and traditional desktop systems. Mirametrix, headquartered in Montreal, is a relative newcomer, and has developed more affordable eye-tracking equipment.
The new Galaxy S4 was unveiled in New York on March 14. Andrew Gombert/EPA In terms of research and application, eye-tracking has been used in a wide range of disciplines, including vision research, psychology, cognitive linguistics, user experience testing and marketing. Eye-tracking was recently used by the Australian media company Fairfax, as part of its neuromarketing research, to analyse the “eye-gaze” of readers on the ads in the smaller tabloid-size format of the new Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. The company’s director of ad strategy was reported as saying the new format, from an advertising perspective, led to a “50% improvement in eye gaze”. Eye tracking is currently being used in spatial cognition, to help understand how people relate to maps and geo-location, and in virtual reality, as shown in the video below. In computer gaming, eye tracking opens up new possibilities in game immersion, where players can aim and turn through “gaze interaction”.
Last September, the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) ran a workshop in Melbourne that included a hands-on session with eye-tracking equipment. Participants were introduced to the Tobii eye-tracking system and participated in an experiment on understanding soil maps, maintained by the Victorian Department of Primary Industries via Victoria Resource Online. This is believed to be the first workshop of its kind. Similar workshops, in which researchers and conference participants will gain exposure to eye-tracking software for spatial research, have been planned for later this year.
Looking to the future
Eye-tracking technology is gaining momentum. From a commercial perspective, there’s great value in understanding where people’s attention falls and for how long, especially when designing technology products and marketing pixel-based real estate. In terms of research, there are many exciting opportunities for using eye tracking to understand visual processes and the ways in which people interact with information. No-one would claim the Samsung Galaxy S4’s move into this area is, in itself, a game-changer – but it’s something of a game starter, and a sign of things to come. Chris Pettit receives funding from the CRC-SI. He is affiliated with SSSI and ISPRS.
Coleman Lab / UCSDScience hasn’t been easy on the paranormal, routinely deflating fantastic claims by hucksters purporting psychic abilities. So wouldn’t it be ironic if scientists were on the verge of making paranormal-like abilities a reality?
Imagine controlling an object with your mind. Or don’t, because you probably already have. I did when I was a (pretty little) kid. It never worked, of course, but boy did I stare daggers at several unsuspecting flower pots, pencils and sticks of chalk.
The trouble, of course, is that your brain works a whole lot better when it’s motivating things it’s actually wired to, say your eyeballs, tongue, fingers or toes. But aha, you’re saying, we have wireless technology in 2013. We live in the future! Can’t we just cut that cord, too? We already have: If you want to get technical about it, when using a handheld remote control with old-school antennae to pilot a hobby-style airplane across a field, you don’t actually touch the radio-controlled plane; the brain-interface includes your hands and the control box. But that assumes you have hands to work with, and working a control box to drive a wireless drone around is hardly “telekinetic” — not half as cool-sounding as it might be if you could simply think that drone into action.
You’ve probably heard of brain implants acting as biomedical prostheses in what’s sometimes referred to as a “brain-computer interface,” allowing someone to manipulate neuroprosthetic arms and legs or simply nudge a mouse cursor using nothing but thought. We’re doing that stuff today. But you’re still talking about interfaces that usually involve invasive technology, often drilled into the skull and attached directly to the brain itself — Jean Grey, it’s not. What if you could reduce the interface to something that didn’t require brain surgery, something not only noninvasive, but roughly the size of a tiny, removable tattoo?
Call it “cerebral cord-cutting.” That’s essentially what Dr. Todd Coleman and fellow researchers at the University of California San Diego are up to, creating “electronic tattoos” capable of interfacing with your brain and wirelessly conveying your thoughts as commands to remote systems and devices. Using what he describes as an “ultrathin conformal” design, Coleman has been developing “foldable, stretchable electrode arrays” that can non-invasively pick up neural signals, EEG-style. Unlike a traditional EEG, which might involve a spaghetti-dinner’s worth of scalp-placed cabling and conductive gel, Coleman’s solution amounts to a tiny piece of pliable skin-like material less than the thickness of a human hair and houses “epidermal electronic” circuitry powered by solar cells or antennae, which also allow it to communicate wirelessly. That’s it up top, a stylin’ body mark that wouldn’t be out of place in a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel.
We first noticed Coleman’s work back in 2011, when it was angled more toward diagnostic medical research, the idea being that small, wearable, easily concealed sensors would make keeping tabs on someone’s biological data — say monitoring brain or heart activity — much easier. If you’ve ever worn a holter monitor, for instance, you know what a mess that can be, and while holter technology’s improved ergonomically over the years, imagine how much simpler it might be if you could just slap one of these tattoos on and have it wirelessly transmit information to something like a watch- or smartphone-based diagnostic app (which, in turn, would be capable of relaying that information back to someone else).
And that’s just the start. According to Txchnologist, Coleman and his team of researchers are actively working on creating electronic tattoos capable of manipulating external electronics like remote-control drones (so not really telekinesis, but as sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”).
It gets even wilder. Imagine placing one of these electronic tattoos near your throat, where it might pick up on subvocal muscle movements. When you think about speaking, forming words in your mind, muscles in your throat and tongue actually move in extremely subtle ways undetectable without sensors. Add one of Coleman’s sensor-laced tattoos and not only might you be able to convert those movements into speech, the tattoos could actually relay words to someone (or something) else wirelessly. If your friend across the room has a smartphone capable of receiving the data, plugged into a pair of earbuds, they could actually hear your speech-related thoughts — pseudo-telepathy!
“We’ve demonstrated our sensors can pick up the electrical signals of muscle movements in the throat so that people can communicate just with thought,” says Coleman, adding that the tattoos could also be used to improve speech recognition by giving apps like Siri a subvocal leg up. Again, the notion of remotely conveying speech or controlling objects with the power of your mind alone isn’t new, it’s the idea of creating a noninvasive interface sophisticated enough to measure biological activity accurately without clumsy intermediary cables and gels that’s groundbreaking. Imagine what you might be able to do game-wise in tandem with something like Microsoft‘s Kinect, or Google’s Project Glass, for instance. As Sony EyeToy creator Richard Marks (not the pop singer) once told me, you can do all kinds of things with ergonomically unappealing technology today, but the real trick is designing something that people would actually wear. Tattoo-sized technology sounds like just the ticket.
Handwriting-to-speech app helps those with severe language difficulties.
ISpeak4U has announced the availability of HandySpeech, the only handwriting-to-speech application for the iPad.
The assistive technology application supplements or replaces speech for people with spoken language difficulties, such as autism, stuttering, stroke, muscular dystrophy, post-operative voice difficulties, and others. Users write what they want to say in any one of thirteen languages, and the software converts the handwriting into speech.
HandySpeech was created by 12-year-old Eric Zeiberg, who was inspired by his sister, Julie, who has speech disabilities as a result of autism.
