Comments on: Proposal: personal object pager

By: Han Cao

Han Cao — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:07:37 +0000

I am always amazed by the fact that so many research gaps in our everyday life received little attention, such as the gap you mentioned here.
When I started PhD research at 2005 which focusing on indoor navigation, I found that one of the potential application was very similar to your idea.
I agree with your opinion of “placing the active element (i.e. the reader) in the hands of the user.” But why you need to employ additional device such as keyring instead of embbed this object pager function (scanning, object selecting interface) into the available computing device such as mobile phone?
If I cannot find my keyring which means that I can not find other objects either. Although the same problem could happen to my mobile phone, but I and my girlfriend always use this way — to use another mobile phone to call my lost phone …
Just a in-depth thought:
As you mentioned in your slides, there is trend that we have to carry more and more personal belongs whenever and wherever we are. Therefore we may need to reverse this trend, making people carry as few objects as possible.
—Hope one day, we do not need to carry anything with us, just our consistent mind and body.

By: Jyri

Jyri — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 17:51:43 +0000

Yeah I agree that it would be useful to have a device that sounds an alert when you’re about to forget an object. Gaetano Borriello at U of Washington has worked on the pre-emptive aspect (they use the expression ‘technological string around the finger’–check out this post on Roland Piquepaille’s blog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2004/10/08.html). It gets a bit tricky if the system should infer the context by making observations ‘behind your shoulder’: on leaving out the door in the morning, are you going to need your laptop and ID badge or is it a holiday? I don’t have a solution, but I’d vouch for something extremely simple where the user is in full control. The U of W prototype also uses a RFID reader installed at the door, which presumably scans every tag that passes through its range. This raises privacy concerns, and I’m personally in favor of designs that work the other way around, by placing the active element (i.e. the reader) in the hands of the user.

By: ronald

ronald — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 14:19:36 +0000

Loved your idea. What about a system that performs a preemptive scan before you leave home, work, taxi, etc.. The object finder would be programmed with a list of things to check for before departing. A sort of memory aid.

By: Jyri

Jyri — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 07:12:44 +0000

Cheers… the link’s now fixed! sorry about that :)

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 13:16:49 +0000

*giggle* It’s good, you’re doing the work for me :)
A very good idea… I’ll email you when I get back.
(oh, and my link is wrong ^_^ )