absolute regularity

Radisson SAS Birmingham
Ths 120707

Executive summary

Two useful contacts:

• h2m8
• Health design & technology institute

One learning point:

• Make sure you broadcast your own messages, and meet your own objectives.

Agenda

(Stripped of ‘Welcome’, breaks, lunch, etc.)

1030
The Assisted Living Special Interest Group
Sue Dunkerton, Health Technologies KTN

1050
The Assisted Living Innovation Platform
Graham Worsley, TSB

1110
The draft road map
Rob Chesters, Medilink West Midlands

1130
Building a new road map
Chris Peters, TWI

1520-1600
Feedback, conclusions, next steps, etc.

Review

I came to this event to find out what opportunities there might be for a speech technology startup (like Llaisdy) in the Assisted Living space. I thought I might get an idea of what products, devices or services involving speech technology were being used in the area, and if there were any end-user profiles or usage scenarios to which speech technology might provide part of the solution.

This attitude proved hopelessly naive. There were no technology demos at the event, and no end-user representations.

There were 20 people at the event (attendance actually peaked at 24 at around 11:15), over a third of whom were from one of the host groups above, mostly facilitators from TWI, I think. No list of delegates was provided, and there were no ‘ice-breaking’ games so, apart from the people I spoke to (see below), I have no idea who the other ten or so people were - except that none of them represented end-users.

Assistive Living white papers and programmes

GW from the TSB mentioned a couple of white papers:

• Our health, our care, our say: A Department of Health document outlining modernisation of healthcare.
• Ambient Assistive Living Article 169, now the Ambient Assistive Living Joint Programme: A European funding programme.

The AAL puts it succintly: the purpose of the programme is “to address the needs of the ageing population, to reduce innovation barriers of forthcoming promising markets, but also to lower future social security costs.”

Smart housing

RC gave a report on the i-Health network’s projects so far. This was interesting mainly for the i-House project. He also mentioned a couple of related documents:

• Manifesto for Smart Inclusive Housing
• Design Standard for Sustainable Inclusive Housing

I should like to find out more about this, and about Smart housing generally. Of course, there are a gazillion i-House projects on the web, but none of them is RC’s; the two docs do not seem to be available on the web either. If/when I can track them down I’ll link them from here.

The ALIP roadmap

The main purpose of the day was to ‘validate’ a technology roadmap which had been drafted last November.

Predictably, in the absence of end-users, the goals were vague platitudes like ‘KISS’ (which was euphemised to ‘Keep it simple’), and the drivers were equally vague references to ‘the market’.

Although the results of the exercise were fairly worthless, the exercise itself was not entirely worthless as it enabled me to meet a couple of interesting people (see below). So, my thanks to the facilitators: especially Michèle Routley for encouraging me to speak up about my own objectives.

Contacts

Health Design & Technology Institute

After I said something to the effect that, “it might bring forward some of these technologies (which were all clustering five or six years in the future) if you could give some clear requirements to developers,” I was approached by Helen Gascoigne of the HDTI. Apparently they team up groups of assistive technology users with developers, with the purpose of developing and testing new prototype technologies. This sounds like a stimulating and constructive exercise that could lead to concrete results. HG suggested I attend some of their events.

h2m8

When I asked, “is there any role for speech technology in the assistive technology field?” there was one delegate who expressed more than the default level of agreement and enthusiasm. I approached him during a break: this was John Guyatt of h2m8. H2m8 do home automation, using standards-based technology to bring the price down and encourage expert users.

Just like my meeting with HDTI, suddenly the clouds parted and I was in the world of focussed, concrete discussions. We talked a lot of tech (RTP, VoiceXML, MRCP). JG made the salient point that a lot of assistive technology could be seen as a subset of home automation.

Next steps

• Keep an ear open for news on the Assisted Living SIG and Innovation Platform.
• Find out more about the HDTI and their activities. Get involved as appropriate.
• Think through some design and implementation issues of speech technology for devices (either home appliances or wearable technology).
• Learn more about the Assisted Living / Assistive Technology and home automation areas.

Entry posted: Monday, July 16th, 2007, 11:20 am ; filed under Business.
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