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Mobile mood rings and weight watchers by Intel

IDF San Francisco I see fat dead people
Tue Aug 19 2008, 11:55

TODAY WE ADAPT to our devices, but in the future our devices will adapt to us” said Mary Smiley, Intel's director of Emerging platforms lab, as she outlined the firm's vision on mobility today.

Smiley's presentation dealt mainly with Chipzilla's “Carry small, live large” research which, as the name implies, aims to bung as much 'useful' tech into the smallest devices possible, something the firm believes will make people not only happier and more informed in their daily lives, but also healthier and safer to boot.

Outlining the multitude of uses sensors could provide to the everyday Joe, Smiley particularly singled out several innovative health aspects to sensory technology, which she dubbed “proactive wellness”.

The concept ranged from the relatively simple - being able to send an automatic message to a worried relative saying whether their loved one had taken a vital pill that day – to the more complex monitoring of an individual's vitals, food intake, relative fitness and daily activity.

For example, an individual with a weight problem would be able to control his/her calorie intake versus their physical activity, using only a handheld device and a sensor attached to their person. The device would purportedly be able to make informed recommendations and give advice such as “you have been idle for much too long, get up and kick a ball around”, or we presume, “put down that Pie, pudgy, I'm watching you!”

Smiley noted that sensors which could recognise their owners could also go a long way in protecting a person's private information, by being able to block any user it didn't recognise. The criteria for recognition, according to Smiley, could be anything from a person's heartbeat, to their speech, movements and, obviously, appearance.

These same devices, Smiley boasted, could also potentially be used in the future to check in to hotels and send an individual's particular preference for things like room temperature, TV channels and any special requests directly to their suites before even having set foot through the door.

Also, in a bizarre cross between having a sixth sense and a hi-tech mood ring in your pocket, Smiley also reckoned Intel's future sensory devices would be able to know what mood their owners and others around them were in, even warning them if someone in the vicinity was a possible dangerous threat.

Just be sure to put it on silent when you go to dinner with the inlaws. µ

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Comments
The Manic Street Preachers

Will they be keen when this redundancy reaches the great Macless Buckingham, or Soho Square, its cup of cheer, no longer running over, ushers having usurped its solemn affirmation with a smoking bans and aggrevated £1.14 on-trade beer duty? Will not the proactive wellness programming dissemble into a 
gigantic experiment with nature and the whole of humanity, which has gone seriously wrong, and wreak dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness? Yes nanny, I'm forced to seek solace surviving only on Slug & Lettuce. Whither has the fair fare days of my merry wandering left off and is now only a surveillance of a poor sod? What almighty powers affords administration whose is perdition? Ha! Overclocker's Spirit world!

posted by : Ghost Exmachina, 19 August 2008 Complain about this comment
These devices of the future, are they like those

cars that fly, robots that would do all our work, living on the moon, etc and all that other nonsense promised in the 1950s.

Change is slow, the ipod is a simple device, using old tech, and that's still thought of as a modern gadget. The stuff she is talking about will take 20+ years before it's used by the masses.

posted by : interested_party, 20 August 2008 Complain about this comment
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