Skip to main content

Beneficent Technology

As immensely useful as RFID can be, it is often in the news for the wrong reasons. PSFK's article on the RFID enabled "Smart Cane" for the visually impaired is a great example of what is possible when technology is brought to bear upon a problem that until then had no good solutions. In another context an RFID-GPS combination would be perfectly 1984-esque but in this situation it only sets someone with a visual impairment freerer than they might have been able to be. A not so happy use of the same technology would perhaps be something like the M-Meter:

"Together with FOCUS, we have adapted this technology, which has so far primarily been used in logistics and inventory management, unconventionally and creatively for better research of readership", explains Dominik Berger, Managing Director of RF-iT Solutions and inventor of the so-called "M-Meter". To that end, stamp-sized miniature chips are applied on each double page, and a reading device specially developed for FOCUS delivers accurate data from the test households showing who used which page of an issue when, how often and for how long. The use of editorial content as well as contact with advertisements can be measured passively in a magazine for the first time.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Destination Infinity said…
It is true that RFID is a great technology but still now been used only for tracking inventory in large warehouses and the likes! RFID is combined with GPS, Cellular and Wi-Fi technologies these days to track inventory end-to-end. It is good to see such technologies being used for the betterment of blind people. Even speech recognition technology is being used for similar purposes - to enable them to operate a computer through voice commands. I wish more projects like that take shape and the Governments sponsor them as well.

Destination Infinity
1:04 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more