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You and Yours - Transcript ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 4 |
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TX: 12.08.04 - HIGH TECH HOMES COULD HELP DISABLED PEOPLE LIVE INDEPENDENTLY PRESENTER: LIZ BARCLAY |
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THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. BARCLAY The home of the future could tell you what's in the fridge that you can use for dinner this evening, it could even spell out the recipe for you. It's all part of a new project by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the University of York to design a high tech home that can meet the needs of disabled and older people who want to go on living independently. The Centre for Usable Home Technology or CUHTec brings together researchers and suppliers, like IT companies and social services. The responsive home is one of their key objectives, Angela Robson's been to visit it and met Julia Brant its manager. BRANT Well here we are in the small entrance lobby - plant, hat stand, clothes - it could look like anybody's home. And beyond that there's a small kitchen. What we're trying to do here is to demonstrate that technology does not have to intimidate, it can be fun, it can be very simple, it can help to keep people out of trouble. ROBSON And we've got in front of us next to the fridge a fairly standard looking sink. BRANT Well the sink is very, very simple, it rises and falls at the touch of a button and it comes with a programmable ball so that you could extend that to speech input, you could tell it by voice to go up or go down. It will go down at the touch and come up at the touch. So it's meant to be a very, very simple application. If you were short you can bring the sink down to your level, if you're a wheelchair user with some adaptation you can get at the sink. The tap fitted to the sink is an ordinary pillar tap but there's a built in sensor which prevents people being scalded if the water's very hot. The centre was set up for a number of reasons. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who fund the centre, were looking for a research partnership to be able to get at the kind of questions as to how technology was going to fit into people's lives in the future. And the University of York has had a long track record in researching human computer interaction. There is a real life domestic environment that we trial this stuff in, so we can point to concrete evidence in the form of experiments and research papers as to why we reach the conclusions that we do. FRIDGE COMPUTER VOICE There are several things that are going off. OLIVIER My name's Patrick Olivier and I'm a director of Lexicle. We collaborated with the University in the construction of this fridge, so Lexicle's a spin out of the University of York that does synthetic characters. FRIDGE COMPUTER VOICE Cook over a low heat and allow to set lightly on the bottom. ROBSON It's a fairly standard looking fridge, apart from this - like a television screen on the front which is in blue with Lexicle wearing a white jumper and black hair. How does she know what's inside the fridge? OLIVIER Okay she knows what's inside the fridge because there's a bar code scanner that's actually embedded just inside the door. So as you put your goods in the fridge, much as you would on a check out, you just scan them past that bar code scanner and as you take them out you scan them out again. We might be interested for starting, for example, we've got to plan a meal, so we go to the recipe … FRIDGE COMPUTER VOICE You might go for the cheese omelette. OLIVIER So here she's suggesting a recipe based on ingredients that the fridge knows are inside it. And we have some filters here so we can restrict those recipes to vegetarian, meals that are quick to make and meals that maybe use up things that are going off in the fridge at the moment and in this case cheese omelettes, cheese omelettes are a priority. And if you go into a recipe you can see what the ingredients are, you can add things to your shopping list directly here, you can get the full instructions. ROBSON So this is the instructions how to make an omelette and can Lexicle tell us how to do it as we go along? OLIVIER Yeah she should be able to, we can actually pick the actual instructions, so you start off … FRIDGE COMPUTER VOICE First eggs, milk and seasoning. OLIVIER And once you've done that of course … FRIDGE COMPUTER VOICE Cook over a low heat and allow to set lightly on the bottom. ROBSON Are we not promoting more interaction with gadgets than people? OLIVIER Well that's a possibility but I think people might have said that about mobile phones. Fundamentally what we're interested in is top technology that mediates everyday life and actually makes everyday life easier to us. So although this looks like a very high tech solution if it actually makes what are for a lot of people difficult tasks - remembering what they've got in their fridge, planning meals, planning recipes, doing your shopping - if it makes it easier it might be a technology people are willing to accept. BRANT We'll go and have a look in the living room, this is one of three rooms which form the public face to the centre's house. So if we go in we can see that it's a normal living room with a sofa, a table and a number of flat screen displays. And one of the things we're trying to do here is to explore technologies that respond to what people have said they would like technology to do. It emerged that people find televisions switched off rather ugly pieces of technology and so what people expressed a wish for was to be able to display something useful on there and here you can see one screen has been set up to take MMS and SMS messages - perhaps you send from your mobile phone short text messages and images to perhaps an elderly grandmother living alone and that forms a link with the relatives. ROBSON I'm now with Dr Darren Reid who's a researcher at the University of York. And Darren what's your role been here in this house? REID One of the areas that I've been interested in is how we might support people who are actually isolated away in their own home. The technology really isn't the point, the point is what the technology can do for people. Is it a good idea to have pictures and messages on your TV? Our role is to understand what people normally do, how they normally keep in contact, for example, how they normally communicate with each other and find technologies that actually either support that or enhance that and bring people closer together. So we kind of start with the people and how they behave, rather than the technology and what it can do. BRANT A lot of the research shows that the majority of older people and more vulnerable people much prefer to be in their own homes than institutional care but there is a possibility of the others - the flip side of the coin being that they feel very cut off. So we hope that in the next six months to a year that we're able to start putting some of the technology that we've trialed here into people's homes and say okay live with this, see how you get on, let us know if you have any particular difficulties and persuade organisations that there is a business case for including this kind of recreational technology in a social care package. BARCLAY Julia Brant from the Centre for Usable Home Technology ending that report by Angela Robson. Back to the You and Yours homepage The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is not responsible for external websites |
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