Patrick F. Spear

Of all the interesting things to come out of CES this year, Samsung’s digital windows takes the cake- if only for personal reasons.

When designing my Futureward project, I often had to assume that some pretty wild stuff will be developed in the next 10-15 years. And pretty often, I’d fell guilty about those making those assumptions, because might drive the project from the realm of responsible design into the realm of science fiction. Chief among those assumptions was the ability to windows that were touch sensitive, embedded with screens and dimmable for privacy.

Displays embedded in glass room doors

So, imagine my surprise when I saw this gem turn up last week:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from FW, it’s that the rate at which the future is unfolding in front of us will always, always surprise you.

For the uninitiated- Raspberry Pi is in-progress project to build a full-featured $25 ARM PC-on-a-PCB. So for $25, you plug in a screen, keyboard, and networking, and then BAM- full-on computer. Of course, things get more interesting when you plug in non-traditional peripherals and blend the setup into a room.

The Raspberry Pi board design

This is another case of something that I researched for Futureward- which I thought would take six or seven years to come to fruition- happening in less than two years. This is a big, significant step toward computing escaped concentrated points- desktop machines, phones, etc- and diffusing across the built environment. This, more than any other, is the major shift that will change how hosptials are built and upon which Futureward is predicated. Incredible to see it happening so quickly; I mean, I could wire up my entire apartment for $25 a board.

My programming skills are beyond rusty at this point, but I’m excited to see what better people than I will be able to do with the platform to enhance medical care.

It’s scary to see how a system, created to be decentralized to the point it could survive nuclear war, can be successfully cracked down upon when there are financial interests in doing so.

It’s things like this that should make people wary of how EHR systems are developed. If the net can be locked down, what will happen to our personal health data which is already wholly controlled by private entities and tied up in layers of red tape?

EHRs are great, but they’re formalizing the fact that we don’t control data about our own bodies, which is an element of making the care experience complicated and alienating. To fix that, step one is to make it possible for you to walk into any healthcare facility with all the information necessary for the staff to treat you immediately and compassionately. Concerns over transferring health records are the last thing you need when you’re unwell.

This is unfortunate news, but unsurprising. PHRs aren’t going to catch on until tracking personal health data is a near zero-commitment job, and right now it’s an uphill battle to wrench that data its traditional keepers. As noted in the article, it’s a concept that’s just a little ahead of it’s time.

I only hope that this setback doesn’t keep them from trying again sometime in the future.

This will be a great help to prototypers eager to get at the body recognition and motion sensing abilities that the Kinect affords.

As has been noted many times before all over the web, motion sensing a brilliant way to interact with health information and health devices without breaking chains of contamination. In an industry plagued by outdated computing models, administered through COWs and awkward intermediaries, this is one technology that we can count on being adopted into the medical arena.

Personally, I see the uses of the tech extending far beyond that as well. If you can easily collect data reflecting human motion in a patient room, then that data can be tied to an analytical engine. Suddenly, you’ve got an simple way to measure patient distress, monitor sleep cycles, detect falls, and much, much more.

At $150, it’s the Kinect is remarkable piece of kit, and a great reminder of how quickly we are being inundated with sweet, sweet hardware that we don’t even know how to fully exploit yet.

What better way to keep things in a patient room contaminant-free than to replace as many physical objects with virtual ones?

A user manipulating a virtual ball.

Very promising stuff here. Great work from Microsoft.

After wading through all the (warranted) geek hype surrounding Android 4.0′s announcement, I found this buried in the developer notes. It’s great news for prototypers- this will hugely lower the barrier to entry for anyone looking to do some proof-of-concept work in bedside tech.