Random reactions

Remote Control IV--Telecare

We are getting older and families are getting dispersed geographically. This means older people are isolated at a time when they have increasing physical needs. (Note that the linked BBC article does not agree with what I write below.)

These older people really, really want to remain independent. They understand that long term care is a deathwatch and that some of the watchers are incompetent--or worse, impatient about their patients' progress towards death. They need a compromise that leaves them in their homes but gives them access to assistance.

Currently in England, the state offers home care visits. These are contracted out to what are essentially temp agencies that give low-paid workers a list of homes to visit and a sheet of the minimum activities they are required to perform. The results are predictable.

What remote care can offer is on-call access to better qualified care, automated monitoring of essential functions and activities, etc. It could actually offer more.

Remote care could include features that allow recipients to band together, performing some of the monitoring functions and permitting communications with like-minded souls. Sort of like a Blog Community.

I've been working on an invention that would put remote care on a platform, and the people I have been talking to as potential customers, while a very diverse lot, have one thing in common. They all believe that some level of independence and control is essential to maintaining sufficient dignity to render continued living worthwhile.

I'm not the only one thinking about this. See also here.

Remote care can provide this, as well as additional features such as remote learning (the best of the seniors get to be really senior by continuing to learn) and remote work (seniors usually need a few extra quid and the millions of CCTV cameras monitoring our activity in Britain need someone to watch them--just as one example of productive work they could do).

Conclusion

The adoption of laissez faire capitalist governance schemes (which I broadly support) has resulted in increased mobility of labour, which has driven families apart. This has affected work, education and care for the elderly. Technology exists to mitigate some of the unwanted effects. This technology will be adopted more quickly if it is presented as a package, not individual components that target consumers with the fattest purse. Technology suppliers have not yet realised this. The online community can and should help raise their levels of awareness.

Remote Control III--Learning to Learn

Distance Learning, obviously, is nothing new. Catalogue courses have been around for quite a long time, and variations abounded before the Internet. I learned basic electronics using the U.S. Navy's BEEP course, entirely self-paced with a stack of pamphlets. All it lacked to be an online course was a network of connected computers.

The strong point for distance learning is found at the intersection of specific skills and motivated students. This is why it should be huge for business, post-grad work and the like.

Distance learning for mass education should be a walk in the park, but two factors need to be overcome before mass adoption. The first is political. If I record a professor's lectures over the course of a year and break them down into chunks to be seen over the Internet, my subsequent need of the professor is diminished. Professors, therefore, are not entirely supportive of the endeavour. Not that they would be out of business--just that their role would then focus on value-add services such as tutoring that many consider beneath them.

The second weak point of online learning is testing. I'm perfectly happy to send course materials to your computer if you just send me your credit card number. But how do I know you're the one completing the exams? The solution would be shared testing facilities and administrative capacity (I once proposed a mobile testing facility to a university in Italy that could test anybody for anything, but the unions and the university administration were not pleased with the package).

The net effect is that certification of online learning has lagged for non-technical reasons, while business courses tend to be delivered over dedicated channels.

Anybody who has followed the development of downloading songs and the internal ruckus it has caused in the big music companies can see that the issues involved are not minor. If large corporations dedicated to making money found it difficult to embrace a new delivery channel, it is no surprise that academic institutions with 1,000 years of an established delivery model might be reluctant as well.

But we are the losers because of this. If that curiously empty section at the bottom of my CV actually reflected the subjects I have studied at length on line, I could command a higher salary. And I would be beavering away learning PHP instead of blogging right now.

I'll tie this together with the previous two posts in my next post on remote care, but even at this stage it should be obvious that companies developing technologies for remote working would benefit from including remote learning solutions, don't you think?

Remote Control Part II

The conversation around mobile working has changed tenor. Where before it focussed on teleworking or telecommuting, with idyllic scenarios of working and playing from home, big money is now being spent on technologies to improve productivity for those workers who already are on the move as part of their jobs. This includes hardware, mostly PDA bastardisations that allow data entry and reception, software that enables the same (did you know that Sybase has 70% of the global market share of operating systems for mobile work applications? It's a little early to ask if you care... but I think you will soon... it's the equivalent of waking up to find Apple has stolen a march again), and of course security solutions to allow bosses to consider the use of mobile solutions.

I wish that just once the developers of these tools would realise the cross channel potential of their toys before they spend billions of pounds fighting each other for the obvious markets. Gentleman (they're almost always male), please listen: These tools can change education and healthcare more rapidly and dramatically than the fields of meter-reading and parking fine administration, exciting though those fields are...

Don't we want an A&E (accident and emergency) physician to be mapping patient conditions, progress and initial treatment from the moment contact is established until the patient comes under the care of the responsible physician? A 3G video phone in an ambulance would not add 1/10th of one percent to the cost of the kit inside already...

Wouldn't the ever-growing supply of supply (substitute) teachers benefit from access to lesson plans and student records to look at on the bus to their daily new nightmare? Wouldn't it make the first twenty minutes of a one-hour lesson, you know, like, more productive?

Well, I'm fighting to keep this short of rant-style length. Parts III, IV ad nauseum will explore this further. Comments?

Remote Control

Three separate strands of technology development need to come together to make a difference in our lives and how we deal with government. Those three strands are mobile working, distance learning and telecare.

Let's call it remote control. Let it come to mean citizens' control of more aspects of their lives.

We've spent a couple of hundred years trying to persuade labour to be more mobile, and the results have been the deterioration of the family unit (with the concomitant loss of much of what was good about strong nuclear families), pervasive anomie in big cities as people arrive for the job and cannot find much of anything else to give their life meaning, longer commutes and more pollution, etc.

We've spent much longer than a couple of centuries separating adolescents and post-adolescents from their families and sending them cheerfully off to large educational factories. When it works, the results are spectacular, and have made a huge difference to society. But the failure rate of these institutions is appalling. If a company rejected as many products for quality purposes, or fired as many employees (after extensive recruiting and testing) as universities lose, they'd be out of business.

And we've tried to centralise medicine, moving actual treatment away from the patient's neighbourhood to ever larger centres of specialisation and palliative care. This has led to the depersonalisation of health care, with its natural results.

We've done this for economies of scale. However, television, radio and the Internet mean those economies are no longer the only game in town. We can provide work, education and healthcare one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one. All of it is up and running.

But it isn't widespread, and it isn't being adopted as much as it could be. One reason, surprisingly, is often government, and another, unsurprisingly, is the established institutions that might lose monopoly provision of service. Certifying distance learning organisations, changing tax and work requirements for mobile working, and funneling enabling and/or pilot programmes for telecare should have started 10 years ago, but hasn't.

If we brought adherents of the three technologies under one umbrella, started advocating services developed on a common platform, and separated delivery into accessible modules brought into households, it would be more affordable, more supportable for politicians, and would aggregate proponents into natural (and much larger) groupings to advocate change.

This post is too long. I'll try and continue in more discrete chunks later. But I'd love to hear your opinions.