Brilliant appliances

The microwave oven is easily the most important recent household invention to extend the independence of older people.

Why?

• It saves time in the kitchen, thus making meal preparation less of a chore for people who don’t like to cook, which in turn saves them money.
• It enables food to be cooked and served in the same container making cleanup easier.
• It reduces wasted food; especially true with restaurant “doggie bags.”
• It can result in safer food, i.e. food that is cooked throughout and therefore has reduced chance of harmful bacteria than food that is just heated (or reheated) on the outside.
• It has created demand for a broad variety of easily prepared meals that just need to be “zapped”
• It makes it practical to make a totally workable kitchen from just a small refrigerator, a sink and a microwave oven.
• It is arguably the most cost-efficient appliance in your home if you compare the amount of use it gets versus the price.

What other recent invention has had the same impact?

Scary thoughts .01

How long will it be before every car has a built-in transponder that transmits the car’s identity to nearby receivers like the ones on toll roads?

Then each city will put in readers at intersections and totally put a stop to all those jerks who run red lights to save a few seconds. You can imagine the hew and cry though when people realize that their cars can now be tracked almost everywhere? Someone would of course want to analyze all that data that shows how fast you drive and how often you change lanes, what freeways you take, etc.

The next thing will be having to insert your driver’s license into a card reader in the dash before you can start the car. Naturally that information would also be included in the transponder signal so not only would the DMV know where your car is, they would know where you are too. So now, someone will know what your movements were when you were supposed to be at work, how many times a year you go to Mexico, Vegas, Ben & Jerrys.

Come to think of it, that’s really scary to think that the DMV would eventually become part of the DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security) and one of the most powerful data gatherers in the world.
Didn’t I see something like that in the movie AI? You know it’s going to happen eventually...

Home Health Monitoring Center

What if your treadmill could connect through your home network to your PC and the internet? And what if there were attachments you could buy to check in addition to your heart rate, your blood sugar, blood pressure, weight, etc.? And what if the interactive software prompted you to enter in some body measurements and answer some questions about how you feel and other health risks?

As an integrated health monitoring system, this machine could:

1. Keep records on your PC of your blood sugar, blood pressure, exercise routine, weight gain/loss and other factors

2. Allow you to do some sort of stress test to gauge your cardiovascular fitness level

3. Give you real progress updates on your workout and suggestions for modifying it.

4. Alert you to contact your doctor if certain factors look out of the ordinary

5. Provide you with records of all the above to take to your doctor (save time and the cost of having them run the same tests!!!)

The concept here is to use the power of your home PC and an internet connection to keep accurate records of your health and exercise routine and through the internet, provide you with real-time relevant advice and guidance based on your personalized stats. It is a known fact that when these results are made more visible, maybe even monitored weekly by your doctor, you will tend to be much more conscientious about taking your health seriously and keep to the program.

The point is that this kind of home-based diagnostic device, or at least record keeping device, would be a great thing for everyone, especially for seniors and people who are on some sort of therapeutic program. It would also, incidentally, be useful for a caregiver (child or a friend) to have access to this information (with permission) through an internet connection so they can see that their mother or aunt is keeping up with her routine.

I know that various types of monitoring devices already exist as very high-priced medical devices prescribed by doctors and either rented or purchased through health insurance, Medicare, etc.

What should be happening is that consumer products companies should be working on less expensive alternatives that people could buy just because they want to keep better track of their health, or the health of their parents. They could even have internet diagnostic tests to make sure that the machines are working correctly and calibrated.

Household Robots

A lot has been said and forecast about how we will all have personal robots helping us around the house and in other places, maybe restaurants, stores, etc. This all sounds cool and plausible and almost everyone knows that sooner or later it will happen. However, when most people use the phrase “sooner or later” they mean later. In the case of robots this may be true, although we are already seeing a few rudimentary units marketed for things like mowing your lawn or vacuuming your house. I haven’t done any research on these but my guess is that they only work well in a very controlled environment where a human being has already done a pre-flight check for any hazards or corrected any situations that are outside the capabilities of the machine (e.g. tee shirt on the floor, sprinklers accidentally timed to go off during the mowing, etc.). The brain power in these first machines is going to be pretty limited.

Hence, the road to success for robots will undoubtedly be a slow and rocky one, with a lot of pain for the first companies out there. In my opinion, robots will need to be programmed with a tremendous number of contingency algorithms to deal with all the weird problems that can present themselves in the atypical home. Even a 2 year old child is more inventive and resourceful than the best robot will be for quite some time to come.

Maybe I’m being unduly pessimistic but I think that household robots will not be particularly affordable or idiot-proof (translate: successful in the marketplace) until a very large amount of programming is done and tested and debugged and highly integrated down to just a few relatively inexpensive ICs.

Maybe someone can devise a way to reduce the A.I. needed for these machines into a few basic modules that can be mixed and matched for the particular job. Then when the customer gets her mechanical friend home, she plugs it into her PC and over the internet answers a host of questions about her lifestyle and the layout of her apartment and what she wants this guy to do. At that point the mother ship executes a mind-meld with little Robbie so that he has a jump start on dealing with his new home.  Maybe his new owner can even pick a personality, like kids do with ring-tones. I have a remote control that you program over the internet like this (Harmony); a brilliant concept in my opinion. This is the only practical way I can see that the necessary customization can be done relatively easily.

The trick will be to develop enough brain power cheaply and design the myriad of sensors intelligently enough to handle most of the everyday problems so that people aren’t always bitching at the poor little guy. On the other hand, maybe we need someone to yell at when we get home. Someone who won’t talk back or throw things; someone who will just apologize for anything that he might have done and go on about his business. It could happen....

Home Business

In the August issue of Fast Company, Shoshana Zuboff notes “In 1900 there were 13 million people over the age of 45. Now there are nearly 100 million.” She also points out that the average life span is 77 years. The average life span! So if you balance out all those young people whose lives are cut short by accident or illness, that means that a whole heck of a lot of people are living into their 80’s and 90’s these days.

This begs the question: what are you going to be doing at age 70? Are you going to be working, or are you going to be retired? My gut feel is that a rapidly growing number of baby boomers are going to want to transition to some sort of home-based business - a business that offers an escape from the corporate rat race but gives them a supplemental income to extend their retirement savings those extra years. People these days are living longer and they are also spending more time “retired.”

In a time when corporate downsizing and “restructuring” tends to focus heavily on those with higher salaries (i.e. more senior people), there are a lot of people scratching their heads and thinking about starting a new career in their fifties. Many of you will be looking for a low-stress home business where you can control your own destiny.

This all points toward yet another incentive for people to extend their independence further into their senior years. It won’t be just for the enjoyment of living in your own home rather than a nursing home, but also for financial survival because it is pretty hard to save up enough money to live comfortably for 20 years. There is already some movement toward developing technology that makes it easier for people to live alone and continue working at home when in the past they would have to move to some sort of managed care facility. Unfortunately most of this activity is in the realm of developing medical devices, not everyday technology that makes your life easier or makes it easier for friends or relatives to keep tabs on you or vice versa.

Lots of interesting trends to keep track of.....