SenseCam pictures I’m glad I have

Having a camera that takes pictures automatically means capturing some wonderful moments that would otherwise remain unphotographed. The SenseCam, invented by Lyndsay Williams when she was at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, England, Is equipped with sensors. It has a passive infrared sensor, so if a person is in front of it, it takes a picture. It has light level sensors, so if you walk through a doorway and the light level changes, it detects the change of place and takes a picture. It has an accelerometer, so it knows when it is jiggling, and waits until it settles down to avoid taking a blurry picture. Its fisheye lens makes sure it gets the whole scene.

Here are a few pictures from SenseCam I am very glad to have, and which I would never have taken with a regular camera: being interviewed by Alec Wilkenson of the New Yorker, meeting professor Ben Schneiderman for the first time, coffee with artist Glenn Payan, professor Hari Sundaram makes a point, and  bumping into colleague Hong-Jiang Zhang at a hotel check-in desk.

Zeo: A Personal Sleep Coach

Zeo is a product to capture a person's sleep characteristics as measured by depth e.g. light to deep, REM sleep times by wearing a sensor headband that transmits one's sleep state to a nearby bedside monitor. The bedside unit capture data over a long time period and is the basis for a "Seven Step SleepFitnessProgram" to improve the quality of sleep.   The Zeo Bedside Display "uses algorithms and artificial intelligence software programs to track electrical activity in the brain to determine your sleep phases throughout the night. This includes length and depth of your sleep, awakenings, and a measure of a single night of sleep, called ZQ, which Zeo has created to help educate you about your Sleep Fitness."  Zeo's optional "Smart Wake(TM)" can also wake you at the "best" time. 

For anyone usingf pedometers, exercise heart rate monitors, or any other health fitness devices including BodyBugg, this product looks to provide significant health benefit!  In terms of recording your entire life knowing something about your sleep says a lot about the rest of your life.

Earth Class Mail: Making snail mail handling efficient & effective

Earth Class Mail is a service to out-source the front-end processing (opening and scanning) of snail mail by having selected mail redirected to this service provider. The service offers mail handling turn-around of one day with options to: open and scan the mail to PDF, forward the original, shred and recycle, and archive the physical and/or scanned mail. While the Press Release that the Swiss Post Office offering the service for their customers drew my attention, the service looked really interesting for people who live and work in multiple places and who need to stay in touch with their mail. Of course the obvious candidates are businesses that want to out-source their mail rooms. 

Absent-mindedness and the latest invention from Lyndsay Williams (Ixp-Note)

Absent-mindedness is not recalling something at the moment that your really ought to. All of us can multiply examples of human memory letting us down in absent-mindedness, from forgetting to drop off the DVDs at Blockbuster on your way to the grocery store to arriving in the family room only to forget why you went there.

For e-memory to help with absent-mindedness it is not enough to just retain more memories. There must be also be an e-reminder at the appropriate time or place. The coming e-memory revolution will include many e-reminder product product offerings. I’m already utterly dependent on reminders from my SmartPhone for appointments.

Now Lyndsay Williams, the inventor of the SenseCam, has come up with a new invention that does e-reminders. It is called Ixp-Note. Ixp-Note is a smart sticky note. This sticky note doesn’t just stick there, waiting to be absent-mindedly ignored at the critical moment. When the time comes, Ixp-Note lights up and makes a sound. Today, my dentist gives me a reminder card for my next appointment. Maybe someday it will be an Ixp-Note, blinking and getting my attention when I need to be reminded of the appointment. And I like this idea Lyndsay has for Ixp-Note:

“Finding lost property, examples are mobile phones, MP3 players, cameras, passports, spectacles, books that are easily lost. An active label Ixp-note on a mobile phone can detect via it's sensors (e.g. touch, motion , temperature and light) that a phone has not been picked up after a certain time, e.g. 24 hours. It will only then then start to sound to attract attention. On picking up the phone, sound automatically stops and is reset for another 24 hours”

Lyndsay, can you make a version that will call my phone after a time interval? Then I can be reminded by stuff I am not near.

Life-loggers not life-bloggers

We are life-loggers not life-bloggers. Logging my life into a private, secure e-memory sounds like a great idea to me. In contrast, I have absolutely no interest in sharing the complete details of my life with the world in a blog. I want to share a few of my e-memories with some of my friends and family, and even fewer memories with the world. My blogging will be extremely selective.

I view my e-memory as an intimate, private extension of my brain. Not that e-memory functions like human memory. It does not. But in terms of privacy and ownership, it deserves similar treatment. My hope is that society and law will come to recognize it as such. There is attorney-client privilege, and surely my e-memory deserves at least as much privilege.