Phone Facts

Don’t bin that Kinect just yet!

April 23, 2013 – 1:47 pm by chris | Posted in Clinical Apps, Health and your mobile

In a hectic life with many commitments, health care might just start to take a back seat.

If getting a doctors appointment isn’t difficult enough these days, you have then got to travel to and from the surgery or hospital, potentially several times.

Now remember Christmas past. When Kinect, the motion sensor for the Xbox was all the rage, and your little bundle wanted one. Please please. And Christmas morning you and the family danced around the living room as this technological marvel tracked your every move to a Take That song?

Ahhh, painful memories for something that now sits all neglected gathering dust, as your bigger bundle proclaims that true gaming doesn’t need motion sensing!

Well all is not lost, indeed some things might just get better.

Sense.ly is a motion based remote medical avatar system.

In short, registered users can hook up to a video based medical service via the Internet utilising your old Kinect box for motion sening.

Using this pre-screening interface, patients can be quickly diagnosed or referred(based on the patients past and current data) to an appropriate medical practioner.

Now, all of this costs, so don’t expect it via the NHS any time soon, but how long before folks get tired of waiting and start to pay for such services in the UK?

Ditch the landline.

March 4, 2013 – 2:02 pm by chris | Posted in Technology

Stay with me on this one.

Optical fibre in communications terms means lots and lots of data. The likes of Infinera are offering N x 100Gbps per line card! Truly astounding bandwidth.

But the gating factor is fibre.

Nationally we have a fibre roll-out plan, typically offering Fibre-to-the-curb, in short the running of optical fibre to a small BT cabinet, and then off onto the existing copper cable to your home or business. Given the run distance between cabinet and home or business is small, high bandwidth can still be obtained over the copper portion.

Sorted right? Well no, because ‘blowing fibre’ to all the nations roadside cabinets will take years and cost billions.

Is there another way?

Well, run the fibre to the mobile masts instead and let the last mile of communication be via airwaves(currently 3G) rather than over a physical piece of cable?

But businesses want proper switch boards to distribute their voice traffic, not a pile of mobile phones!

Enter the Wireless Deskphones, looking and acting exactly like your landline, but utilising a simple 3G SIM card. So if you use your landline simply for voice calls, then exchange it for a SIM based service and remove some of the rental costs.

Just a thought!

It’s all gone 3Doodler …..

March 1, 2013 – 11:50 am by chris | Posted in General Interest

I hate 3D glasses, either in a cinema or watching 3D TV, the concept is alien and irritating, but is a reaction to the 2D world that currently envelops many of our activities.

From the simple letter or scribble on a piece of paper, to the universal use of computing platforms and screens, two dimensions dominate.

But that might just be changing.

For those of an XBOX leaning you will already have used Kinect, a device which relays positional information of the gamer back into the platform to be displayed in the game.

Now come SpaceTop 3D Interactive computing, which effectively maps you, your face and hand movements in relation to the simple computer desktop, allowing your to engage in a thre dimensional experience.

But what about the simple pen, could that be upgraded to write in three dimensions?

Well check out the 3Doodler , ideal for schools or collages or even those who doodle on out note pads during a meeting……now everyone can see how bored we are!

Enjoy

Figure Running – Pavement art?

January 17, 2013 – 3:12 pm by chris | Posted in Entertainment, Wellbeing Apps

I run, not as much as I used to but the pavement is still pounded and the calories burnt.

Sometimes I run to music and other times I just let the mind wander, but the route is often the same with bits added or removed depending on how I feel.

So how about adding a creative element to running?

Figure Running is basically artful exercises, where a combination of an App and a Smart Phones GPS functionality traces the route and creates pictures.

Run in a group and the greater potential art forms.

It might sound odd, but it would surely take the mind away from the pain!

RP-VITA – coming soon to your local hospital

January 15, 2013 – 9:24 pm by chris | Posted in mHealth Services

The digital ages offers the medical institutions access to a unprecedented array of clinical information, which if utilised correctly delivers great benefits to today’s patients.

But like computer users worldwide the real trick is to sort the trash from the gems and bring them together in a meaningful and constructive format.

Interested parties include the medical teams at the hospital, the family and potentially specialist skills located off campus. In addition information can be delivered via audio, video or in text format, and some, if not all, must be wrapped in a secure communications envelop.

Now for those of us brought up on Star Wars the concept of hoards of c3po’s roaming the hospital wings might seem far fetched , but with the release of RP-VITA that has come one step closer.

Developed in partnership with the folks who developed the Roomba vacuum cleaner, RP-VITA is a 5ft high medical robot, that navigates the hospital acting as a mobile information console, bringing together all interested parties both locally and remotely.

No, it can’t climb stairs yet, but the lift makes a viable alternative and when it’s done its rounds it simply returns to the docking station to recharge.

Sprout – simple but tasty

January 14, 2013 – 5:28 pm by chris | Posted in General Interest

There are moments when something catches my eye, and I applaud the creativity and simplicity.

Whilst Sprout has nothing to do with mobile it brought a smile to my face.

As a golfer I’m constantly binning the small pencils used to mark the scorecard. Now I can simply plant them instead.

Bone Conduction technology – sounds great!

January 10, 2013 – 10:27 am by chris | Posted in Entertainment, Technology, Wellbeing Apps

Even without external influence, the simple facts are that as you grow older both your ear drums and the tiny hairs in your inner ear decay, which effect both hearing and
balance.

Scientist have already developed drugs which may in the future regenerate these hairs, but with the arrival of headphones and other sources of loud noise, the current trend is for increased hearing loss in our twilight years.

What if you could still hear your favourite tracks but bypass the sensitive eardrum?

Enter ‘Bone Conduction Technology’

Aftershokz have launched the Bluez Bluetooth enabled headphone that uses you skull to transmit sounds to your inner ear, avoiding the eardrum, whilst leaving your ears open to stay aware of your surroundings.

The use of Bluetooth links the headphones to most mobile devices/music players and could be the start of a new trend in wearable head gear……Google glasses anyone?

SPAM sms messages

December 3, 2012 – 12:39 pm by chris | Posted in Day-to-day phone operation, General Interest

In the last two days alone I’ve had 4 SPAM text messages all offering me PPI, personal injury or unsecured debt write off.

SPAM is better known as an Email related issue. Now, thanks to more robust detection software when an inbound email hit it’s associated Email Server, SPAM is detected and either removed or Flagged for the end-user to act upon. In addition if this is a regular occurrence the associated IP address block will be Blacklisted. The Blacklists are then circulated to major corporations/organisations, whose Servers will them Block anything inbound from that IP address. The effect can be significant, especially when you consider that Europe has completely run out of IP v4 addresses.

Texting( SMS) was originally developed as a communications tool between mobile engineers, and whilst its spread has been remarkable, the Mobile Operator networks are not yet constructed to hold and detect SPAM in the same way as emails.

So what can you do.

I Googled the topic and discovered that each mobile operator has a Number to which you can forward the offending SPAM text for their review.

O2 is 7726

I’ve have yet to determine what(if anything) the operator would/could do except bar the originating caller number(if it was on their network). However, as the mobile networks move toward 4G/LTE/IP based networks it may become easier to track and block this most irritating intrusion.

Let your Avatar improve your health

November 19, 2012 – 3:16 pm by chris | Posted in Entertainment

One plus one makes two.

Xbox plus comfy chair makes obesity…..and square eyes, lack of social skills, lethargic etc. etc.

This stereotype revolves around you simply driving a dumb game, displayed on a screen, whilst eating crisps and loosing all sense of reality.

But hold on, we now have two-way video interaction from devices like Kinect that can map you and your physical activity, might that help matters?

You mean Wii fit style?

Well yes, but whilst dancing around the living room as a caricatured mini-wii, trying to work off the third helping of Turkey may impact the Christmas bulge, but most folks struggle to keep it going past January.

The key lies in Avatars, a virtual you, created to socially interact in games like Second Life. It seems that by creating a virtual you, for others to interact with, players invariably construct a positive physical avatar.

Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz, Assistant Professor of Communication at U of M, looked at self-reported data from 279 users of the game Second Life, where players create virtual avatars and interact in an online, social context with other players. She had participants report on how fit or idealized their avatar was and report their own height and weight.

“Taking on a different persona online can have real effects on your offline health when you’re embodying this avatar that you’ve created,” Behm-Morawitz stated. “Oftentimes that physical or virtual embodiment is idealized in nature. And rather than having a negative impact on self-esteem, this was motivating.” Behm-Morawitz found that in general, Second Life players used their avatars to test out new looks or styles in a low risk environment. She also believes the social nature of Second Life enhances the sense of identification users have with their avatar. Because it’s a medium through which they interact with others, she suggests, people are more prone to identify strongly with their avatar.

Which then leads on to possible mhealth applications.

If within the virtual world, your avatar is provided with a health and fitness mantra, then this could be a route to the off-line self. In a virtual world health providers could introduce their own avatars to guide others down more health conscious routes, with real-world information, like blood pressure etc. being introduced and group sessions created to share experiences, virtual or otherwise.

So, the Wii fit board can continue to gather dust as our real-avatar shows us the way to a longer, healthier life.

Social Fitness and Diabetes

August 31, 2012 – 12:36 pm by chris | Posted in Wellbeing Apps

So you go to the NHS Body Mass Index website, type in your details and boom, you are now classed as Overweight, and as that bulging waistline begins to clamp your vital organs, a whole range of illness from Dementia to Diabetes loom large on the horizon.

With the increased levels of obesity in the UK population comes the huge effect on the NHS, with the York Consortium predicting Type 2 diabetes treatment could single hand, bankrupt the Organisation if left unchecked.

Armed with my Smart Phone and a desire to exit the ‘overweight’ category, I plotted my way through the T’internet and here is what I came up with.

The start point was a Fitness app. When you start any diet or fitness programme there are usually positive signs, but the challenge is to keep it going. Fitocracy combines the Social Networking with Gamification, in short the more you achieve the more credits you get in the virtual Fitocracy world.

By linking like-minded people together in a members only forum, confidence is built and others are there to help you through the rough patches.

Step two was a Calorie counter. There are literally hundreds to choose from, so I tried Livestrong and Calorie counter to tot up the daily allowances.

The diet however had nothing to do with an App, in fact it came from the Horizon programme by Michael Mosely. In it he explores fasting, and the increasing evidence that it can significantly improve both mental and physical wellbeing.

So for the last four weeks, on two non-consecutive days per week, I’ve dropped my calorie intake to 600, whilst eating normally for the other 5 days. I’ve used the calorie counter app to plot what I eat(and it’s not much!) and the fitness app to improve my all round activity programme. The result is 8 pounds off in 4 weeks, and I’m no-longer classed as overweight.

Result