Three years ago I was organizing a street game called Manhattan Story Mashup. It was part of the Come Out and Play festival. During the event, approximately 250 players moved around Manhattan, taking photos which matched a given target. Targets were words from stories, written by players and other visitors on a web site collaboratively while the game was going on. The resulting illustrated stories were shown on the Reuters screen in Times Square in real-time, and on the web site www.storymashup.org. It was a huge success and a blast. As I was running around getting things organized, I didn't have time to take too many pictures, but you can find pics, video and everything through the website. Also, hitting "manhattanstorymashup" to Flicr search should bring you some nice shoots.


                                       

It was the first, and to my knowledge sadly last, large scale experiment by SensorPlanet, a Nokia led initiative that studied the use of wireless sensors. I had of course used the camera, voice and video recorders, motion sensors, and GPS before, but the whole concept of mobile sensors didn’t really hit me until then. A whole new world opened up for me when I spoke to these SensorPlanet guys. The potential of billions of networked mobile sensors, at that time, presented the ultimate modern intelligent society model to me. It was one of those Heureka moments.

The same kind of ‘sensor wow’ hit me today when I read this fantastic article on “sousveillence”. Sousveillence is a term opposite of “surveillance”. Those who can French will know that “sur” in French is “on top, from above”, and “sous” is “underneath, or from beneath”. So, surveillance is something that the government, corporations and police do with their surveillance cameras and eavesdropping laws, watching over people. Sousveillance is something done by the people, by using their various sensors, to watch their government, police and others from the streets (e.g. the Blair Watch Project for people to track Tony Blair’s movements in 2005, or the death of Ian Tomlison during G20 protests).

The “wow” thing was this: As people age, there will be more and more assistive technology around. For example visual hearing aids, or visual memory aids consisting of a wearable recording videocamera. The Visual memory aid is described in the article as follows:

“The University of Toronto is involved with various projects to invent ... assistive technologies for people with special needs, for example, laser EyeTap electric eyeglasses help people to see better. When combined with a wearable computer that provides supplementary visual information to its wearer, the computerized eyeglasses can also help Alzheimer's patients and others to remember things better. This is known as a Visual Memory Prosthetic (VMP)."


                                                      
                                                                           EyeTap - Photo credit: Steve Mann


In addition to the Visual Memory Prosthetic, the article also introduces PSD, a communications prosthetic for people who need assistive technology. PSD will help them communicate better with others. A communications prosthetic also helps protect communications challenged people from violence by keeping a record of what happens, making it obvious to the perpetrator that there are remote witnesses. PSD can facilitate a real-time discussion with a remote entity, for example if a person with speech or hearing impairment is stopped by an officer on the street.

Btw, In addition to people with hearing or speech impairment, I can also see a use case for a PSD for people who cannot speak or read the local language. A direct connection to a " back office" will help you when you are stopped by a police officer in rural China, and there is no one in sight who could help translate. Combined with the VMP, the visual memory prosthetic, you could get help reading the signs in Chinese, Russian, or Arabic. PSDs and VMPs could help anyone navigate in a totally foreign environment.

This same could be achieved with not-too-distant mobile Augmented Reality solutions, sophisticated nanotechnology sensors "smelling" the environment, and visual based translation solutions. However, if a personal assistance service is set up for the disabled, why couldn't it be used by the "abled", too?

In 2007 (oh, how time flies) I was invited to speak at AAATE conference, the Association for Advancement of Assistive Technology. I covered my findings from there in a blog entry before. There's one finding that I remember moving me quite much: Most of the wheelchairs in the world are manual, because many have lost their ability to walk in landmines, which wrongly are seeded in the poor countries. Also, accessibility in these countries is not very good, as these issues are often not considered important. This makes moving around with wheelchair difficult. Apparently, when operating a manual wheelchair, the arm movements differ  according to the surface and speed. By automatically tracking the person's arm movements, and posting that information on a map, it is possible to draw a map for people using wheelchairs. This map will have all the ramps, surface etc. all laid out. The presentation was held by Dr. Rory Cooper on his research with Alicia M. Koontz et al. I hope you find it interesting. I have developed the idea further, to come up with a map for anyone traveling on wheels.





Images from: Alicia M. Koontz, PhD, ATP; Rory A. Cooper, PhD; Michael L. Boninger, MD; Aaron L. Souza, MS; Brian T. Fay, PhD

Assistive technology is super cool. I wish our colleagues in the mobile phone industry would come to the same conclusion, and pull learnings from the development of assistive technologies. There are two areas that are quick to implement the outcome of Computer Human Interaction research. These are the gaming industry and assistive technology. The mobile companies are following the game industry closely, but I claim that there is a lot more to learn from the assistive technology development. Especially their usability studies. Isn't it just plain obvious that people with under and overdeveloped senses would be better testers than people who'se senses are somewhere in the middle. Implementing Universal Design when designing mobile phones, and then widening the true testing to include people with various physical and cognitive disabilities will benefit everyone. Every one.

Long live sousveillance and free individuals, with our human defects and all.