My grandmother had such a button but almost never wore it since she would not be caught dead with such an ugly accessory (even at 93 and still a bit vain). Research shows that more than 50%(*) of the people that have such an alarm often do not wear the button because the feel stigmatized by wearing it.

These companies spend lots of money on the development of software and hardware but almost never ask their customers what is it exactly that they want and what it should look like. I am even convinced there is a market for “designer alarm buttons”.

Question is how to involve them in a way that can show what technology does and how it can help them, in stead of leaving them with incomprehensible technologies. But that will be discussed in one of the next postings.

(*) Porter, E.J. (2005). Wearing and using personal emergency respone system buttons. Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 31(10), 26-31.

(Digital) conversations against loneliness

Games are always a great seducer to get people to interact with one another. In WordFeud the possibility also exists to chat with your opponent while playing a game. This leads to lots of conversations, often between elderly and their family but also between strangers. Conversation diminishes loneliness and less loneliness leads to less doctor visits… The best examples for the creation of social technologies in healthcare can often be found in everyday life. When families get together they also often play boardgames like Scrabble. I fondly remember the games of Scrabble we played with my grandmother. WordFeud brings this same mechanism to our digital lives. And often keeping the conversation alive through a digital channel enhances the meetings in real live.

Also published on www.tedxmaastricht.nl

Looking at this speech is still amazing after all those years. Not just because of the eloquence of Kennedy but because of the idealistic spirit of a society that sets a goal and is willing to make great sacrifices in order to achieve that goal. I think in our age and time we have lost some of that willingness to put society first and the individual second.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

And of course, as he promised, this was the result on July 1969.

Today an article is published in Spits about the medical black box and a radio interview was held with us on Radio 1 at the AVRO.

You can find the article here.

Nice thing about the blog is that it forces you to think about a (small) subject and in order to say something coherent about it. Twitter is much more instant gratification it seems: fun but also easily flushed. Let’s see if I can switch back to the blog a bit more.

Lykke Li – Tonight from Lykke Li on Vimeo.

At the moment I am working on a project for Rathenau institute relating to privacy and the information you can find on individuals on the Internet. I was talking to a friend who works for social security in a large city and he said that the Internet is a source they often use to get information about people.

One of the sites they are using is www.wieowie.nl. This is a service that queries information about a person from all kinds of sources: google, yahoo, schoolbank, hyves and others. But it also finds telephone numbers, the tags that relate to that person, photos and document that are associated with you.

It turns out that they regularly find information about people that points towards fraud. For example somebody who is asked by someone else how her vacation was in Mexico. At the social security service they for example can see that that person did not register for a vacation. Result can be that the person is invited to come to city hall to show her passport that may have a Mexican visa stamp in it….

This is an example of a new type of transparency that is becoming more and more pervasive in society. And it is not just the information you yourself put on the Internet. In the example above it can also be some of you friends discussed on hyves a story that you told them about your vacation.

In a way I think transparency is good. It can help us be more authentic. But it can also be a dangerous instrument when people trust too much on information that may be wrong or even distorted on purpose. As society we need to think about how to deal with this type of transparency.

Happy Holidays!

In comes a commercial company, Onvia, that made a website that tracks the planning and spending of the stimulus package on the website recovery.org. This website relies on a crawler mechanism that checks thousands of websites on information about spending in relation to the stimulus package and make this information available to the public. For companies to lead them to intesting projects to pitch and for citizens to check what kind of projects are being setup in your local neighbourhood and make it possible to complain about silly projects to local politicians. Below is an interview with the CEO of Onvia:

I think this is an interesting development where formal reporting procedures are turn out to be much slower than can be achieved with public scanning of websites and some intelligence of crowds. Question of course is to check the validity of the information but, as they say in open source: with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. Enough citizens using a website like this to check on progress and projects means a pretty good check on the validity of information.

Because so much of our activities in our daily lives have some form of connection to the Internet some amazing effects happen. Google recently launched a service where they track flu related queries that people are using in their searches. Analysing their data back to 2003 and comparing it to the CDC network they found that they can pinpoint the start of a flu epidemic two weeks earlier than the CDC. They can even follow the spread of the flu geographically (at least, in the USA).

This is I think an amazing example of how we can use this kind of implicit “wisdom of crowds” type of ideas. considering the risk of the swine flu epidemic in Mexico this might come in handy… The flow of the epidemic can be followed in Google maps.

More information you can find in the Nature article and of course on the Google website.

In the presentation (that you can find here) we showed many examples how ICT in general and SaaS in particular will change the banking sector significantly in the coming years. For example, Google already has a banking licence in the Netherlands…

The presentation changed into a lively and interesting discussion with the the audiance. The general feeling was that financial institutions really should be more aware of the strategic possibilities (and competitive dangers) of ICT. At the moment we are working an a way, together with HFC, to keep that discussion going.

You can find the presentation here.