A prototype glove.
Professor Paddy Nixon’s team is developing more intuitive ways to interact with computers, such as games where your whole body becomes the joystick, a glowing hand-held device to guide you home and a ‘memory glove’ to help perform everyday tasks. “The disappearing computer concept is about making the computer respond to all the normal things you do, making it natural and intuitive,” says Prof. Nixon, professor of distributed systems at UCD and a principal investigator with the Adaptive Information Cluster.
Sensors are central to the approach, explains Professor Nixon, whose work is funded by Science Foundation Ireland. For example, he and Dr Lorcan Coyle are using location sensors to get kids exercising while playing computer games. To play Tetris, the child wears a credit-card sized sensor on a necklace or in a pocket to track their movements, allowing them to reach up and ‘move’ bricks on the screen.
The fun and games also provide a test bed to develop the technology for other causes, including helping people with partial memory loss. The team has now developed a prototype hand-held device that glows to direct a person towards their home. Taken straight from an Isaac Asimov book, the “glow tag” uses sensors to get location co-ordinates, works out a route home and then glows in the appropriate direction. It’s a simple idea but requires some tricky programming, notes Nixon, who works on the project with Dr Simon Dobson.
Another clever application is a prototype glove that can read tiny radio-frequency ID tags placed in everyday objects such as cups and teapots. The glove is programmed to recognise when someone with Alzheimer’s disease is performing a stepwise task, such as making a cup of tea, and prompt them if they need it. “You could eventually put the technology into something as convenient as a watchstrap,” notes Professor Nixon. The AIC is currently leading an international ‘open source’ project to build up the software needed for these types of applications, and they are also looking to embed the concept into mobile phones, says Professor Nixon.
