Within 5 years we could research and deploy scores of services supporting 100,000‚s of the cognitively disabled! The services would run over a public network used in common by commercial enterprises, governmental agencies, and a continuing research pipeline of new services.
OnStar is a set of services General Motors offers its automobile customers.
These services include anything from navigation support, road service, remotely
unlocking your car door, up to managing a personal reminders calendar. An important
element of these services is that they are delivered using what GM calls "adaptive
technologie" ? human agents supported by successively refined automation.
Using OnStar as a model one can envision a collection of configurable services
delivered to the cognitively disabled via the new generation of wireless Pocket
PC, augmented handheld visors, or even smart cell phones. Examples of services
include: A human advisor one click away, old fashion phones ? cell phone with
a savvy human operator, navigation services, managed e-mail, daily living services
(e.g. prompting, shopping, „I‚m locked out‰, panic switch, ?),
simple family communications (e.g. take your aging mother for a walk on the
other side of the continent).
Exploiting the ubiquity of the Internet and the advent of new generations of
wireless devices it is within our reach to create a „public‰ network
that will support both research and production delivery of services. The network
would consist of:
Using the OnStar concept of „adaptive technologies‰ most applications
begin with significant human agent support. As automated components are added
the efficiency of the agents increases. In some cases, the agents are automated
completely out of the process. In other cases, the agent interfaces are made
so easy to use that family and friends can replace the service agent. Many services
may reduce down to enhanced communications directly between the disabled and
a family member (e.g. take mom for a „walk‰ to see how she is doing).
Because services are stackable, and scaleable smaller research services can be developed in realistic circumstances, exploiting industrially scaled capabilities, and staged toward production scale systems.