Google researcher Bill Schilit, along with academics Jeonghwa Yang from the Georgia Institute of Technology and David McDonald from the University of Washington published a paper in IEEE Computer on home activity recognition, which is an proposal for a system that would track people's activities at home via network interactions.
The idea is that via home monitoring, technology could become active assistants, doing things like reminding people to perform forgotten tasks, helping them remember information, or encouraging them to act more safely or healthily.
Naturally, folks pointed out privacy questions, including data protection, data access, and legal aspects. The paper proposes types of data that could be collected from devices attached to a home network, similar to a Web search log that records the use of search engine.
The paper is kind of interesting, but a little behind the times in terms of what is already outside. Microsoft has been working on smart home technologies for several years. Those RFID tags embedded in products? – already a network there to do tracking of individuals as they cart products around. Just a small step to link other technology to this RFID tags. My Pocket PC can control technology in the home (and has been able to do for years).
So, I am failing to see what is new (in the research front). In terms of implementation, of course, there are hundreds of nifty things that still need to be done.
Here is the full article on home activity recognition
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1 comments:
My dogs have been wearing SNIF Tags for the last five days. Impressive...get to see what the canines do when we're at work. Turns out they sleep...a lot.
More impressive is the implementation work. I've worked with lots of activity monitoring systems, none have been this easy to setup, maintain, access. No driver/software installs...instead there's a base station that connects to the network and automatically uploads data when tags are in range. All data can then be viewed from any Web browser with a Flash plugin (sorry iPhone users).
I hope the next generation of human activity monitoring can learn from canine usability techniques. Again, no drivers that won't run on my Apple machines but crash horribly when installed on Windows boxes. Slick way to shift complexity from customers to custom hardware.
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