Thesis 29


Everyware is strongly implied by the needs of an aging population in the developed world.

At the moment, those of us who live in societies of the global North are facing one of the more unusual demographic transitions ever recorded. As early childhood immunization has become near-universal over the last half-century, access to the basics of nutrition and healthcare have also become more widespread. Meanwhile, survival rates for both trauma and chronic conditions like heart disease and cancer have improved markedly, yielding to the application of medical techniques transformed, over the same stretch of time, by everything from the lessons of combat surgery, to genomics, to materials spun off from the space program, to the Internet itself.

It really is an age of everyday wonders. One reasonably foreseeable consequence of their application is a population with a notably high percentage of members over the age of sixty-five. With continued good fortune, many of them will find themselves probing the limit of human longevity, which currently seem to stand pretty much where it has for decades: somewhere around the age of 115.[*]

[*] Curiously enough, after a demographic bottleneck, it is the percentage of the "oldest old" that is rising most markedly. Apparently, if you can somehow manage to survive to eighty-five, your odds of enjoying an additional ten or even twenty years are sharply improved.

At the same time, though, with fertility rates plummeting (the populations of North America and Western Europe would already have fallen below replacement level if not for immigration, while Russia and Japan shrink a little with every passing year), there are fewer and fewer young people available to take on the traditional role of looking after their elders. At least in this wide swath of the world, society as a whole is aging. For the first time, we'll get to explore the unfolding consequences of living in a gerontocracy.

This inevitably raises the question of how best to accommodate the special needs of a rapidly graying population. Unfortunately, our present arrangementsassisted-living communities, round-the-clock nursing for those who can afford itdon'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 countenancedit 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 challengefor 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 augmentationin 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 onwould 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 targetsthis 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 other health-related conditions, detecting falls and similar injuries, and ensuring that users are both eating properly and taking their prescribed medication on schedule.

To so many of us, the idea of living autonomously long into old age, reasonably safe and comfortable in our own familiar surroundings, is going to be tremendously appealing, even irresistibleeven if any such autonomy is underwritten by an unprecedented deployment of informatics in the home. And while nothing of the sort will happen without enormous and ongoing investment, societies may find these investments more palatable than other ways of addressing the issues they face. At least if things continue to move in the direction they're going now, societies facing the demographic transition will be hard-pressed to respond to the needs of their elders without some kind of intensive information-technological intervention.



Everyware. The dawning age of ubiquitous computing
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
ISBN: 0321384016
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 124

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