Positive Technology Journal

 

Urban Tapestries aims to enable people to become authors of the environment around them – Mass Observation for the 21st Century. Like the founders of Mass Observation in the 1930s, we are interested creating opportunities for an "anthropology of ourselves" – adopting and adapting new and emerging technologies for creating and sharing everyday knowledge and experience; building up organic, collective memories that trace and embellish different kinds of relationships across places, time and communities.

It is part of an ongoing research programme of experiments with local groups and communities called Social Tapestries.

Re-blogged from Smart Mobs

Young people value their mobile phone more than television, a new study has found. The survey, conducted by the LondonSchool of Economics and CarphoneWarehouse, polled over 16,500 young people in the UK to find out how mobile phones have changed the way we live.

Over a quarter of people aged 18-24 highlighted their mobile phone as more important than the internet, TV, MP3 player and games console. Only 11 per cent chose TV, while nearly half voted for the internet.

BJ Fogg's Persuasive Technology Lab (Stanford University) is sponsoring Mobile Persuasion 06, a one-day conference on how mobile technology can change people's beliefs and behaviors.

From the conference website:

Mobile Persuasion is for innovators, researchers, and companies creating mobile technologies that change people’s beliefs and behaviors. Applications include health, commerce, activism, social networking, addiction, advertising, gaming, and environmental conservation. This full-day event will feature expert presentations and panels on how mobile technology can change attitudes and behaviors.  

 

The event will take place November 10th at Stanford University. Free registration is available for a limited time.

Via Medical Connectivity Consulting 

FitSense Technology's ActiHealth Intelligent Network provides an end to end system that collects, transports and presents physiological data automatically. Data that can be viewed instantly by the user as they go through their day. In the ActiHealth network, the body sensors monitor several health indexes, including physical activity, calorie burn, weight, body fat, blood pressure, blood glucose, heart rate. 

According to the company,  the system can be used in  a range of health care applications, such as  programs for weight management, health & wellness, and disease management.

Via Medgadget 

From the project's website 

CatchBob is an experimental platform to elicit collaborative behavior of people working together on a mobile activity. Running on a mobile device (iPAQ, TabletPc), it's a collaborative hunt in which groups of three persons have to find and circle a virtual object on our campus.

Videos of CatchBob!:

• The long video (3:30, .mov, 15.8Mb) can be downloaded here.
• The short version (1:20, .mov, 8.3Mb) can be downloaded there.

Re-blogged from Smart Mobs

Via New Scientist 

According to New Scientist, haptic devices (i.e. devices that stimulate our sense of touch) will add a new dimension to communications, entertainment and computer control for everybody, and for people with visual impairment they promise to transform everyday life. One proposed device consists of a headband that imprints the shape of objects in front of it onto the wearer's forehead, something that visually impaired people could find a great help when navigating though a cluttered environment. Moreover, cellphones could soon have a tactile "display", for example, and portable gadgets containing a GPSdevice will be able to nudge you towards your desired destination.

Read the full article 

 Via Emerging Technology Trends

Eurotech expects to have the product "on the shelf" in late July, priced at $2,500. 

The Origami Cell Phone is a future cell phone concept, which uses flexible e-paper to create a larger-than-cell display.

The concept was developed at Inventables, a consulting company specialized in "just about possible" applications.

From Smart Mobs

Daegu in South Korea "will be the first city in the country to provide a “ubiquitous” healthcare service in which so-called wearable computers will be used to monitor the health of elderly people living alone and patients with chronic diseases,"this article says."The devices,in the form of shirts,alert medical staff in real time when an emergency occurs.Daegu City said Thursday that it will launch its groundbreaking “U-Healthcare Service” in cooperation with the Ministry of Information and Communication.The city will distribute the bio-shirts to some 100 elderly people and patients with chronic diseases later this year.The shirts have embedded sensors that register vital signs and send the information to medical centers through the network. They also permit self-diagnosis, distance monitoring, emergency care and medical consultation for users in an environment of ubiquitous connectivity"

Daegu to Launch 'Ubiquitous' Health Monitoring 

 

 

Via IFTF's future now

According to Unwired View, Motorola has recently put forth a patent for the Feng Shui Phone, which has the following functionalities:

• Three-dimensional Hall-effect sensor for measuring the strength of electromagnetic fields and to form a compass to determine the geographic direction in which the main wall of the house faces.
• Digital camera to determine color saturation, order and balance of the surroundings.
• GPS receiver to determine geographic location of the phone.
• The coordinates are then sent to the GIS databse through wireless network to to get the information about the surroundings of the location, e.g. the distance from the undesirable sites such as major airports, landfills, and factories.
• Cellphone microphone is used to measure noise level of the location.
• AM/FM radio to measure the AM and FM transmission strength and the distance form nearest AM/FM towers.
• The table with the chi values of each parameter is stored in phones memory and is used for calculation of chi  values of different parameters.

The company Sensatex is looking for beta testers for its SmartShirt System, a wearable physiological information management platform based on technology developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  

From the website:

According to Sensatex, the shirt can be used to remotely monitor home-based patients, first responders, hazardous materials workers and soldiers. It also can be used to monitor signs of fatigue in truck drivers and to support athletic training.

Via Textually.org

Motorola has patented a new phone technology adaptable for the hearing impaired.

"By automatically detecting speech patterns of the elderly, the technology automatically boosts incoming and outgoing audio while simplifying menu structure and increasing font size.

The special needs of the elderly can often be in conflict with other users, such as the youth which often desire the smallest, most feature rich devices possible. Hence, the technology allows one device to adapt and accommodate to both market segments."

Telecommunication devices that adjust audio characteristics for elderly communicators - United States Patent Application 20060088154

Via Networked Performance 

Lisbon, Portugal, 15 - 19 May 06, Espaço Atmosferas, Rua da Boavista, 67, Lisbon.

From the conference's website 

The mobile phone has reached a level of adoption that far exceeds that of the personal computer. As a result, they are an emerging platform for new services and applications that have the potential to change the way we live and communicate.

Mobile Processing is an open source project that aims to drive this innovation by increasing the audience of potential designers and developers through a free, open source prototyping tool based on Processing and the open sharing of ideas and information. This workshop will introduce the Mobile Processing project and prototyping tool and provide hands-on instruction and experience with programming custom applications for the mobile phone.

Contents:

- Introduction to Mobile Processing, phone hardware and development platforms.
- Survey of projects with the phone as both the platform and subject for new forms of interactive applications and electronic art.
- Basic programming and prototyping concepts with 2D graphics and animation.
- Phone input/output handling including keyboard, camera, sound and vibration.
- Internet networking. Parsing and generating XML-formatted data.
- Text messaging and Bluetooth networking.

The workshop will be practical and at the end every participant will develop a personal exercise.

Equipment

Windows highly recommended, but Mac OS X is acceptable, with built-in or USB Bluetooth adapters recommended. Mobile phones with support for Java and Bluetooth recommended.

Participants are encouraged to bring their laptops.

Schedule

20 hours: 5 sessions X 4 h
15 to 19 of May 06 - 18h-22h

Target

Basic programming skills, familiarity with Processing recommended but not required.

From textually.org 

Electromagnetic radiation from your mobile phone may impair your ability to make snap decisions, such as when driving a car, an Australian study shows, reports Optus.net via Engadget Mobile and Techdirt Wireless.

"The study, which will be published in the journal Neuropsychologia found evidence of slowed reactions, on both simple reactions and more complex reactions, such as choosing a response when there is more than one alternative.

The researchers found these effects after people were exposed to electromagnetic radiation equivalent to spending 30 minutes on the phone."

... Another interesting finding of the study was that the participants showed a slight improvement in working memory, such as remembering a phone number long enough to dial it."

Via Pasta and Vinegar 

Nicolas Nova (Pasta and Vinegar) has found an article describing a a curious device: Telebeads: Social Network Mnemonics for Teenagers by Jean-Baptiste Labrune and Wendy Mackay (IDC2006)

From the article: 

This article presents the design of Telebeads, a conceptual exploration of mobile mnemonic artefacts. Developed together with five 10-14 year olds across two participatory design sessions, we address the problem of social network massification by allowing teenagers to link individuals or groups with wearable objects such as handmade jewelery. We propose different concepts and scenarios using mixed-reality mobile interactions to augment crafted artefacts and describe a working prototype of a bluetooth luminous ring. We also discuss what such communication appliances may offer in the future with respect to interperception, experience networks and creativity analysis.

The ring addresses two primary functions requested by the teens: providing a physical instantiation of a particular person in a wearable object and allowing direct communication with that person. (…) We have just completed an ejabberd server, running on Linux on a PDA, which will serve as a smaller, but more powerful telebead interface

In a lengthy and thorough article entitled Mobile phones and health, The Economist, reports on a study carried out by Rifat Atun and his colleagues at Imperial College, London, rounding up 150 examples of the use of text-messaging in the delivery of health care. "These uses fall into three categories: efficiency gains; public-health gains; and direct benefits to patients by incorporating text-messaging nto treatment regimes. The study, funded by Vodafone.