I like the initial idea that Kevin came up with for Bob's persona... however does Bob necessarily need to be wheelchair bound? The idea of assisted living is to allow Bob to have a more normal life in spite of his impairments.
Using the same persona (Bob) I propose we move away from the idea of the wheelchair, and towards a more ambient type of assisted living i.e. providing the assistance through several day to day objects in the home, in such a way that Bob can live a normal life without being bound to a single machine for assistance.
Apart from this, there are also issues with the inevitability that Bob will have to leave his wheelchair at some point, for example to use the bathroom or to shower. In the event that he fell, he would not be able to call for assistance.
My suggestion is to have Bob's house wired with voice recognition devices and gesture sensors that will allow Bob to maneuver around his house (maybe, if he wishes with the use of, but not limited to - a wheelchair). If Bob needs to make a phone call, there will be specific points in his house that have this voice recognition and will allow him to call out "DIAL" and the name of the person in his address book to make a call. Using augmented reality with voice recognition, Bob will be able to call out "LIST" or "ADDRESSES" and numbers in his address book will be displayed on the nearest surface.
Gesture cameras can also be embedded on certain appliances or furniture to aide Bob in using them. For example for high to reach places (such as a top shelf) Bob can make an arm gesture such as "pulling rope down motion" which will send a signal to this motor operated shelf to be lowered. If you dont know what i'm talking about when i say motor operated shelf being lowered I will show you a similar example at my house. I have a very high to reach clothes rail on the top part of my wardrobe (that not even Sean would reach - so no short jokes here:P) ... it has a lever that I can pull down on to lower the rail to my height. Same concept - except without having Bob lower it down himself, seeing as how he has 1 arm.
What do you think? Its a lot harder I think... but imagine designing a house in this manner!
brilliant mar! looking at the thing from the concept of a whole house gives us endless possibilities,
ReplyDeleteWe can give bob a welcome mat and underfoot scanner outside his door, which reads a chip in his shoe (he has one leg), and unlocks and opens the door for him, and a second underfoot scanner just inside his house, which will close and lock the door after him.
Bob can also have a security camera outside his house, whenever people ring the door bell, Bob can see who's at the door from a tv screen in his kitchen, and press a button to automatically open the door (without him having to go to the front door...screen will also give out a warning when door remains unclosed (we installed something similar for my dad's mum)
When in the shower, Bob will be sitting down, and will only have use of one hand, so we could also use voice recognition to handle temperature control for the water.
Also, what if Bob liked reading books before, having one hand means he can no longer hold the book and flip pages, so what about giving him a wall mounted (and enlarged version of the) kindle, which will scroll up and down (either via hand gesture tech, touch tech, or voice recognition tech)...i mention 3 options so we can avoid having too much of the same technology if we see its getting monotonous
lots of other ideas we can come up with....prosit mar your environment has inspired =) haha