on Feb 8th, 2006Accenture’s Talking Medicine Cabinet
In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL, the computer onboard was programmed to take charge under defined conditions. HAL, of course, went bonkers. But that early technological glitch hasn’t stopped Accenture from dreaming up a talking medicine cabinet for senior citizens.
Since we know the mind loses its ability to focus as we grow older, a talking medicine cabinet begins to sound like a welcome addition to the family. Now if Accenture could add arms to the sides of the cabinet, wouldn’t it be nice to have those meds handed to you and then receive a warm and friendly hug as the cabinet said, “I love you, darling.”
Anyway, the first prototypes tend to be done by research and tend to be pretty quirky because they speak to as broad an audience as possible. The first one in RFID was a talking medicine cabinet. The first thing it does is recognize you; there’s a little facial recognition thing going. It’s an entirely local application, so you’re not out there (on the Internet). It recognizes you and says, “Good morning, the pollen count is pretty high today, you’d better take your allergy medicine.”
So, you reach in and grab a pill bottle and pull it out and that’s where the RFID is. It says, “That’s not yours, that’s the wrong medicine,” and you put that back, pull out another one and it says, “That’s the right one. Now take two of those.” And the mirror–instead of just being a mirror, it has a screen. All of these things are now starting to be actually discussed commercially, but in ‘97 it was “Oh, come on.”
Newsmaker: Making sense of sensors
Accenture: Talking Medicine Cabinet
By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: August 12, 2005
Magic Medicine Cabinet: A Situated Portal for Consumer Healthcare
Dadong Wan
First International Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (HUC ‘99), 27-29 September 1999, Karlsruhe, Germany
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a smart appliance for consumer healthcare called “Magic Medicine Cabinet.” It integrates such technologies like smart labels, face recognition, health monitoring devices, flat panel displays, and the Web to provide situated support for a broad range of health needs, including condition monitoring, medication reminders, interactions with one’s own pharmacists and physicians, as well as access to personalized health information.