Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [41]
This inevitably raises the question of how best to accommodate the special needs of a rapidly graying population. Unfortunately, our present arrangements—assisted-living communities, round-the-clock nursing for those who can afford it—don't scale very well, complicated by prideful reluctance or simple financial inability to accept such measures on the part of a great many. Even if everyone turning eighty wanted to and could afford to do so, neither appropriate facilities nor the qualified people to staff them exist in anything like the necessary numbers. So the remaining alternative is to try to find some way to allow people to "age in place," safely and with dignity and autonomy intact.*
* Obviously, there are many alternative responses to this challenge, some of which are social or political in nature. In ubicomp circles, though, they are almost never countenanced—it rarely seems to occur to some of the parties involved that these ends might better be served by encouraging people to become caretakers through wage or benefit incentives or liberalizing immigration laws. The solution is always technical. Apparently, some of us would rather attempt to develop suitably empathetic caretaker robots than contemplate raising the minimum wage.
A number of initiatives, from the Aware Home consortium based at the Georgia Institute of Technology to Nomura Research Institute's various "ubiquitous network" efforts, have proposed a role for ubiquitous computing in addressing the myriad challenges confronting the elderly. (If a high percentage of such proposals seem to be Japanese in origin, there's a reason: the demographic crisis is especially pressing in Japan, which is also almost certainly the society most inclined to pursue technical solutions.)
Some systems, though originally developed for the elderly, have broad application for use with children, the disabled, or other groups for whom simply navigating the world is a considerable challenge—for example, a wearable, RFID-based system recently described in the Japanese Mainichi Shimbun that automatically turns crossing signals green for elderly citizens, holding oncoming traffic until they have crossed safely.
Others are more focused on addressing the specific issues of aging. Context-aware memory augmentation—in the senses of finding missing objects, recalling long-gone circumstances to mind, and reminding someone boiling water for tea that they've left the kettle on—would help aged users manage a daily life suddenly become confusing, or even hostile. Equally importantly, such augmentation would go a long way toward helping people save face, by forestalling circumstances in which they would seem (or feel themselves to be) decrepit and forgetful.
Users with reduced vision or advanced arthritis will find voice-recognition and gesture-based interfaces far easier to use than those involving tiny buttons or narrow click targets—this will become especially critical in managing viewscreens and displays, since they may be the main source of socialization, entertainment and mental stimulation in a household. Such "universal" interfaces may be the difference that allows those with limited mobility to keep in touch with distant family members or friends in similar circumstances.
Meanwhile, the wearable biometric devices we've discussed have particular utility in geriatric telemedicine, where they can enable care centers to keep tabs on hundreds of clients at a time, monitoring them for sudden changes in critical indicators such as blood pressure and glucose level. The house itself will assume responsibility for monitoring