Oct 25, 2005
Aibo to fight obesity
Via Medical Informatics Insider
The canine robot would be able to monitor daily food intake and exercise levels and encourage overweight individuals to stick to their diets. The dog would be connected by radio to the bathroom scales, a pedometer and a personal organizer in which the owner would note his daily food intake.More to explore
MIT Media LabAIBO, Sony
UbiComp
17:20 Posted in AI & robotics | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: Positive Technology, robotics
HHS Awards $17.5 Million to Advance Health IT
Telemedicine Insider reports that the Health and Human Services Department has awarded three contracts totaling $17.5 million to public-private groups to accelerate the adoption of health IT and the secure portability of health data. HHS will award contracts for development of prototypes for a nationwide health information network later this month or in early November.
17:04 Posted in Research institutions & funding opportunities | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: Positive Technology
Portable augmented reality
Via we-make-money-not-art, TRN
Microsoft researcher Andrew D. Wilson has developed a portable augmented reality system that uses a projector and computer vision technology to display interactive images on any surface such as floors, white board and walls. The system, called PlayAnywhere, is a single portable unit and does not need mounted cameras. Further, the system does not require calibration. 
Besides edutainment applications, this portable AR system could have interesting applications in the field of neurorehabilitation of brain-injured patients. I have used a similar approach in the project I-Learning. In this project, we developed an augmented-reality display to guide physical and mental practice exercises for patients with upper-limb hemiplegia following stroke.
PlayAnywhere: A Compact Interactive Tabletop Projection-Vision System, Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2005), Seattle, October 23-26, 2005 PDF
16:50 Posted in Augmented/mixed reality | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: Positive Technology, Augmented/mixed reality
Neurobiology of the self on Scientific American
Via Brain Blog
The November 2005 issue of Scientific American publishes an article by Carl Zimmer entitled "The Neurobiology of the Self". This is the abstract:
The most obvious thing about yourself is your self. "You look down at your body and know it's yours," says Todd Heatherton, a psychologist at Dartmouth University. "You know it's your hand you're controlling when you reach out. When you have memories, you know that they are yours and not someone else's. When you wake up in the morning, you don't have to interrogate yourself for a long time about who you are." The self may be obvious, but it is also an enigma. Heatherton himself shied away from direct study of it for years, even though he had been exploring self-control, self-esteem and other related issues since graduate school. "My interests were all around the self but not around the philosophical issue of what is the self," he explains. "I avoided speculations about what it means. Or I tried to, anyway."
16:15 Posted in Telepresence & virtual presence | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tags: Positive Technology, Presence