A-Tech Review

Price vs. Service in Assistive Technology

As the price of a product drops, and its market increases, the amount of service and support you can get on it goes down.

I first learned this important law from my late father. In the 1960s he ran a TV repair shop called TowerTV. He got out of the business in 1973 for personal reasons, but it turned out his market timing was excellent. TV repair quickly disappeared as chip technology made TVs more reliable. (This picture, believe it or not, was taken when my dad was 65. He passed away in 1999.)

And anyone who got into repair soon found that the same forces would work faster-and-faster as they moved up-market. Fact is it's now more expensive to repair a consumer video camera or PC than it is to just replace it.

That's what people do now. Lots of niches, like the one occupied by my friend Alex Randall back in the day, have virtually disappeared, and the biggest problem with the electronics industry today is its environmental impact -- pollution on the front-end, landfills on the back end.

Support, training, some help here? Fuhgetaboutit.

How to really celebrate Disability Awareness Day

Tomorrow, at Cal State Sacramento, they will be holding a Disability Awareness Day.

There will be technology demonstrations and " a tour of the Services to Students with Disabilities High Tech Center located in the Academic Information Resource Center, Rooms 2010 and 2011."

I know. I'm so excited I could plotz.

This is the kind of self-congratulatory group hug we usually see from well-meaning people, It's show-and-tell. And I should add, before continuing to sound snarky, that the University of California system is the most advanced in the world, when it comes to delivering assistive technology solutions to students.

But here are some alternate activities:

The Market Charity Model

Most assistive technology is delivered with a charity model.

Governments and private entities, organized on a non-profit basis, unite to create solutions for clients.

This is not the only model for assistive technology.

What I would like to see more of is the market charity model. This is what the Skoll Foundation (right) promotes as social entrepreneurship.

This model first developed as dot-com millionaires and billionaires started setting up foundations to give away their money several years ago. The idea was that, instead of giving money to projects which would help people, they would give money to projects that would seek profits in helping people. In this way, they felt, their gifts would become self-sustaining.

Most of what we've seen at events like the recent SKOLL Forum and the CSUN Conference has been based on the charity model. While there is nothing wrong with such conferences, in creating solutions, I think they're all missing the ultimate point, which is self-sustainability and the market.

Social entrepreneurship, in other words, needs to accelerate.

It's possible many of the market charity foundations may also be missing the boat here. Instead of creating a single entity and sending that into the market, I think it would make sense to fund multiple entities, and to keep funding new entities as new ideas arise, in the same solution areas.

The Global Opportunity of Always-On

What I call Always-On technology, sensors and monitors using a wireless network as an application platform, sounds like science fiction. It also sounds like an opportunity that can only be real in the most advanced countries, like the U.S. and Japan.

But that is simply not the case.

The Singapore blog Dream Ink details some of the real opportunities, in discussing the need to treat seniors better:

• China will have 174 million senior citizens aged over 60 in 2010, and the number will peak in 2030 when the national population hits 1.5 billion.
• About 80 million Indians — more than the entire population of Britain — are over 60 at present. This figure is projected to touch 100 million by 2013 and 198 million by 2030.

Singapore itself now has 291,000 elderly and this number will double by 2020.

The Importance (And Danger) Of A Warm COAT

The Blind Bookworm reports that some 45 organizations -- state, local, and federal -- have gathered together into a grand coalition they are calling the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology, or COAT for short. (The coat at the right is from the 18th century. Why will become obvious.)

COAT has some big dreams:

• Extend disability protections to the Internet, forcing Web sites to support assistive technology.
• Make all TV-like devices support closed captioning.
• Apply closed captioning to IPTV
• Restore video description rules that were knocked out by the courts, and extend them into digital TV.
• Extend relay service taxes to VOIP
• Require accessible interfaces on all consumer devices.
• Demand accessibility for 911 services.
• Get Universal Service Fund money for people with disabilities.
  

Happy Spin Betrays Unhappy Truths

Back when I was writing about the World of Always-On, wireless routers as platforms for applications which live in the air, no one was following me.

Now they are. Mostly they're doing it with happy fun talk, but they are following.

Here is a good example. It's the blog for Gilbert Guide, a nursing care directory. It calls Always-On applications "ambient intelligence environments," which is a fancy way of saying that sensors track the patient's activities, reducing the load on caregivers.

I don't object to any of this, including the renaming of the technology to something complex and forbidding. What I object to is the presumed sales method and the power relationships built inside it.

When Always-On applications are sold as a system, to the family, the patient loses power (and so does the family -- it's a system sale like buying the nursing home itself). When the application is sold directly to the patient or the family, when you're able to get a heart or sugar monitor at BestBuy, or get the plans for a complete home makeover at Make Magazine, now you have the power and control.

The Importance of PDF Equalizer

One of the most important bits of assistive technology around may be PDF Equalizer. It's from Premier Assistive, which has been in business since 1998.

As the name implies this is a tool for dealing with Adobe PDF files. PDFs are commonly used for reports posted on the Web, and in electronic books.

One of the big problems with PDFs is that they're highly complex. They don't have to be linear like book pages. They can have nested charts, links, dependencies of all sorts. These are quickly apparent to those with sight, but to those without it's not so obvious.

So it's not enough that software support reading the text of a PDF to you. If it just does that, you've lost most of the meaning. Given the technical nature of many PDF documents, plain reading won't really help you.

So PDF Equalizer does a whole lot more.

Always-On and Assisted Living

A recent Minneapolis Star-Tribune story illustrates what I call The World of Always On, and the enormous power of assistive technology based on wireless networking.

The headline most will see is a proposal to give tax credits for assistive technologies. In this it was carrying water for Ecumen, a non-profit in the business of building senior care centers that has lately focused on technology enabling lower costs and better care, specifically installing monitors from QuietCare in patient rooms.

HealthSense, which is based in Minnesota, also sells a sensor network called eNeighbor, essentially a movement sensor that monitors patients over a wireless network and alerts caregivers when patterns suddenly change.

Europe Takes the Lead in TeleMedicine

Medical help delivered by the Internet is going to be a huge industry, absolutely huge. A small investment in this research today can reap enormous dividends. And much of the chip and networking technology needed was developed in the U.S.

But we're giving that lead away, because it's Europe that is making the investment.

A 20-member consortium dubbed the SOPRANO Project is going to put 12 million Euros into practical investigations of what I call Always-On technology.

The World of Always On, which consumed many of my efforts in 2003-2004, posits using a WiFi network as a platform for applications which live in the air. RFID chips, sensors, and motes in our environment, and in us, constantly report via wireless data radio to programs that are always-on, perhaps in the WiFi router itself. These programs analyze the data, and give alerts when conditions warrant, perhaps to the patient, or a caregiver, a doctor, or an ambulance.

In the SOPRANO Project 600 people across Europe will test the technologies, aiming to find solutions that work, user interfaces that are comfortable, and an a defined application platform that can then be used by industry.