- Intelligent Assisting Technologies (IAT)
- I@
- "Caretaking"
Contents
Description
- People want to feel secure and loved by their car (car cares for its occupants)
- the car anticipates its occupants' needs and wants and provides as many of them as possible
- the car performs this function through the use of data sources (bits) such as:
- personal calendars, event calendars
- routing information, waypoint information, destination information, traffic reports, weather reports
- legal information
- and through sensors (atoms) such as:
- temperature, humidity, light levels
- health conditions
- fuel levels and consumption rates
- branch one: north americans desire a high level of agency
- branch two: north americans give up agency in favor of full automation
Stories
Story 1: Soccer mom
- suburbanite soccer mom taking kids to school before commuting to the city for work
- the car feeds the kids
- the car prints out copies of electronically submitted homework assignments
- the car shows television shows to the kids
- the car shows news clips relevant to the mom's work
- the mom does work on the way while the car takes care of everything else
Story 2: Old couple
- See I Hate My Car in Stories.
- -
Integrated assistive technology:
I@
I have two children, two cats, a puppy, a husband, a house, a part-time job, a growing network of friends, and a large extended family. I have two hands and limited patience. My mind is racing all day long. I need a secretary.
What I got was a car. It isn’t a secretary, but it helps more than you’d think. Let me go through a typical day, and you’ll see why.
It’s 25 degrees outside. I hate that. But my car’s the same temperature as my house, because of my TemPal. It’s a little doohickey that sits on my keychain. The service department sent a technician to sync the temperature in my house and in my car. When I move from the house to the car, the car reads the house temperature and adjusts accordingly – I can even start the adjustment five minutes before I get in the car! When I go from car to house, it does the same. I know it’s silly, but sometimes little things make a big difference.
I drive the five-year-old to school. The baby’s in the back. I’m expecting a call, and I certainly won’t drive with the phone in my hand. Nor can I use one of those headsets – have you ever tried to keep one of those in place whilst turning around to keep the five-year-old from torturing the baby? I plug the cell phone into a port in the car, and it activates a crystal-clear speakerphone. I have the latest cell phone. It’s amazing. I got it when I got the car. It’s all part of a customizable package, it all gets serviced at the same place, it all works seamlessly – the dealer sent a technician to sync my car, my house, and my gadgets – and best of all, I lease it all! I get a new car every three years, and I get new gadgets – phone, mp3 player, PDA, etc. – whenever I want to return the old ones and pick up some newer versions (their Innovations Department is always offering cutting-edge models of everything). I sign year-contracts on the gadgets, but my husband went for the six-month option. The technicians transfer everything over to the new models. And when we travel and have to rent cars, we rent from the same car company, so all our devices work perfectly in the rental. It was a really smart move on their part to recycle the returned leases in the form of a rental agency. I don’t rent from anyone else. Why would I? Our gadgets work in Fauber cars, so with Fauber cars we’ll stick.
Now I’ve got a long drive down to the FedEx depot. I know there are seventeen thousand things I need to do, so I turn on the car’s ListMate. It syncs with my home ListMate, my portable ListMate, and the one at my husband’s office. We go back and forth. It reads out tasks I tend to do daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly, if I want it. It reads out tasks I’ve already entered at home, and one’s my husband’s entered at the office. I think out loud, and it records the tasks I say. Then we go through task by task, and I tell my ListMate when I want to take care of these tasks – today at 3, Wednesday at noon, by the end of the month, etc. It sends an email to my husband, it prints out a list at home, and it reminds me of tasks throughout the day. Once I decide on a discrete list, it even takes the addresses (e.g., I need to pick up the prescription at the pharmacy), talks to the Traffic and Construction Wizard, and plots out the best route and order for my errands.
I’m waiting in carpool line to get my five-year-old. I stick my DeskStick in the USB port and my home desktop appears on the console monitor. The wireless keyboard is under the seat. I can pay bills and book those tickets while we wait in line.
When the five-year-old gets in the car, she is already whining that she wants to go straight home so she can watch her cartoons. I turn on Nanny-on-the-Go. It is a monitor linked directly with a children’s programming network. It shows all popular cartoons in real time, plus it has an exhaustive library of family-friendly movies. No more changing channels. No more juggling DVDs. And it has child-friendly controls that she can use. We’ll have peace on the long drive to the vet.
Thank god I have a SeCARtary.
Dystopic: Security
- due to domestic security concerns (terrorism, racial tensions, class wars, etc) the car is a mobile fortress against external threats (perhaps we can posit this for a military user rather than offer it as a dark future)
Trends and Milestones
Technical
car acts as powerful agent:- HealtCare technology becomes more and more a consumer good:
- Intelligent home based medical monitoring devices become widespread
- increase in available self-monitoring technologies
- medium range communication sends a request for an MD to all cars in the proximity in a medical emergency
- Driving Assistance takes off
- augmented reality
- Intellilligence embedded in the world of matter
- sensors / cameras will be everywhere
- Remote Car Diagnosis, Updates (software repair) become common
- ubiquitous computing includes the car as node in the network
- global all-embracing (bio-) feeback loops (e.g. call centers) / in next two years
- Digital traces by everyone,
- smart fashion,
- dedicated computers embedded into everything
- RFID at .5 cents per sensor
people don't give away tasks to the car:
- Technology stays to expansive to be integrated for a mass market
- Technology proves not to be stable, realiable
- Security breaches become a problem
Sociological
car acts as powerful agent:- Importance Of HealthCare Increases
- people become older and stay longer vital and want to drive (US populatio 60 -69 will triple (whole US Population will increase to 310 mio) until 2015)
- health info market grows dramatically by 50% each year
- Market driven health care takes off
- healthcare spending will increase (percentage on entertainment / cars decrease?)
- baby boomers support their family at home
- health insurance companies require more detailed and more frequent measures of well-being
- auto insurance companies require more detailed and more frequent measures of driving behavior
- as cars become more comfortable people spend more times in their cars to work, run errands
- people want technology that helps to multitask while driving (Driving comes up as the 10th point of what peole do in their cars at a brainstorming session)
- ownership society continues to proliferate; independence and self-sufficiency grow more important to American identity
People don't give away tasks to the car:
- People who work deal with ubiquitious comm. devices/electronics want to escape from than in their free time / go to pure nature
- Too much choice in media, VEC equipment, ... overstrains customer so that he's not using anything
- People don't trust incar technology to take car for their health
Cultural
car acts as powerful agent:- -
People don't give away tasks to the car:
- People retrofit cars, removing latest hi-tech gadgets?
- People deactiviate hi-tech gadgets? (Having the option to turn them off is important)
White Board Notes
Go to I@ Big White Board Shots for bigger files.
There seems to be a gap between these two images, describing the basics of IAT, de-emphasizing health care aspects.
