Archive - 2013
July 11th
#Glass Discussions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/11/2013 - 06:30Glass Discussions
I'm active in several discussions about Glass online and recently a couple questions came up where I shared fairly long comments. To try and keep together some of what I'm writing about Glass in one place, I'm adding them here.
The first question was from a UK firm that asked where people saw Glass going in healthcare.
I wrote:
I work for a Community Health Center in the United States and have recently gotten Google Glass. We've been having lots of discussions about how we hope to use Google Glass.
Enhancing our Telemedicine program
(See http://quality.chc1.com/echo/ for more information about our Telemedicine program)Making our EHRs available to our medical providers via Glass, including improved ways to do screenings and enter information into our EHR system.
Using Glass as an advocacy tool to help people recognize the social determinants of health around them.
The second question asked what markets were likely to be largest for Glass, did people think it would be law enforcement? I replied:
My father-in-law is a retired Federal agent. He is very excited about Glass from a law enforcement perspective. I work in health care, and I'm very excited about it from that perspective. Friends work in marketing and creative services and are very excited about it from that angle.
I think it is way to early to try and guess which market will be biggest. If I were guessing, I might go with health care, because it is such a large market. As a nation we spend a lot more on health care than we do on law enforcement, unless you include the full defense budget.
I also think it is useful to look beyond the current Glass prototype. Where do you see this going? I tend to think of Glass in terms of wearable computing. If we add devices like Fitbit and Pebbles into the same class and ask where this class of devices is going, the question gets even more interesting.
To sum it up, I'd take an old saying and twist it around for Glass, Follow your interests and the market will follow.
What are your thoughts?
July 8th
Perceiving the Other-side of the Brief Flashes that Enrich Us.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/09/2013 - 03:19Yesterday a child came out to wonder
The lightning bugs flashed in hot and humid early July evening as Wesley rolled and rolled in the tall grass of our unmowed lawn. His dash to the pond followed by this rolling was not enough to remove the smell of skunk from his fur. I sought a bucket as my wife gathered soap, baking soda, and vinegar to give him a bath.
Some of my earliest and dearest childhood memories were of lightning bugs, when our family would gather with some other family we were friends with and the adults would talk in the growing darkness as the kids chased brief flashes of light.
My fifty-third year has been filled with such reflections. I ran for State Representative and was a member of the 2013 Connecticut Health Foundations Health Leaders Fellowship program. Both of these adventures caused me to stop and spend time thinking about who I am and what really matters.
My mother died and I looked back over these fifty three trips around the sun. We sold the house I grew up in and sorted through the years of memories that had been stored there. I read through school assignments which reflected an angst about the world I lived in as a child.
In the middle of the night, Wesley barked. I woke up to see what it was and get him to quiet back down. He is now asleep, but I am not.
I look back over the past year. Miranda completed her Master's degree and published a book. Mairead completed her Bachelor's degree and is preparing to go spend a year in Japan. I never finished my degree and I hope that my daughters and I never stop learning.
It is quiet now. I hear the gentle whir of the refrigerator trying to keep the food cold, the ticking of the grandfather's clock as time creeps by, and in the distance, a bullfrog or two.
The circles continue to go round and round. I used to sing that song to my older daughters when I put them to bed at night. I used it as a framework for a piece I wrote about the birth of my youngest daughter.
My mother is now dead. The house I grew up in has been sold. Friends come and go and come again. This past weekend, I reconnected with a long time friend as we talked technology and trade. Yesterday, I hugged our Chief Medical Officer goodbye as she left CHC for the next great phase of her life.
Her friends, walking out of the health center with her, wiped away many a tear. Yet things will proceed at work and I have a strong sense that we will continue to cross paths.
John Donne wrote
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
Yet, to borrow from another poet, H.D., about 'perceiving the other-side of everything,', these connections, from childhood through our adult lives enrich us.
So the years spin by and now the boy is …
fifty four.
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through.
So, as I set out on my fifty-fourth circle round our solar system, I take a moment to try and perceive the other-side of the brief flashes that enrich us.
July 6th
Glass as Sensor
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/06/2013 - 23:02Yesterday, I blogged about my plans to get together with a friend to talk about Glass development. I went on to share some initial thoughts, which mostly revolved around Glass as a device used to retrieve information. Yet much of today's discussion focused on a different aspect of Glass, Glass as a sensor, used to transmit information.
I touch on the Glass as sensor a little bit, at the end of yesterday's blog post, when I talked about using it in fitness, along the lines of Fitbit. Yet my friend, an MIT engineering graduate, and son of a retired MIT professor, with strong ties back to his alma mater encouraged me to think more about Glass as sensor.
In the past, we had worked together on complex event processing projects and developed code for analyzing complex data using Matlab. We talked a lot about various sensor related projects at MIT, so this shift of discussion wasn't a surprise.
What information is Glass capable of gathering right now? Images. Sounds. Location. Can it gather fine motions? Temperature? Other data? What might one be able to do if one could take this information and use it to trigger events?
How can this information be accessed? It looks like location information can be subscribed to with the Mirror API, but other information may need some sort of special Android App for Glass to be developed.
So, I'm starting to explore a little bit more working with the Mirror Api. I've sent messages to my Google Glass from the sample apps as well as from the playground. Next step will be to create something on my server.
Now, I've spoken with a few different people about developing for Glass. It will be interesting to see who comes up with what.
July 4th
Thinking about Glass Development
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/05/2013 - 02:00This weekend, I'm getting together with a long time friend and software developer with whom I've worked on many interesting projects. We'll spend some time thinking and talking about what could be done using Google Glass.
I've commented to people that Glass is still a prototype and there isn't a lot out there for it yet. You can send pictures and videos to Google+ Twitter, Facebook, Evernote and probably a few other locations. You can get limited notifications from Twitter, Gmail, CNN and the New York Times. You can search information and get directions. I did find a fitness app being developed which I tested once and should test more when I get a chance.
Currently, I've been using an app called FieldTrip on my Android phone. When I am near a location of interest, a message pops up on the phone about the location. This would be a nice app on Glass, especially if you could select different topics your interested in having pop up. My understanding is that Ingress uses the FieldTrip framework, so getting Glass to send me a pop up message when I'm near an Ingress Portal would be very nice. Adding filters, so it would only pop up if the portal was a certain level or controlled by a certain faction would also be nice. Advanced features might be to look for specific portal owners, mods, etc., sort of like some of the stuff in Ingress Intel Total Conversion.
There is a development platform, which on first glance appears somewhat limited, but has potential. One of the things I'm particularly interested in building frameworks. I've worked a lot in Drupal over the years, so I'm interested in a Drupal module that would allow for the easy access of nodes via Glass. I'm also interested in some sort of Wiki for Glass. At work, we use Microsoft's Sharepoint as well as Microsoft's Analysis Services, Cubes. A framework for accessing Sharepoint or Cubes would also be very nice.
Making it so the Drupal nodes, the Wiki entries or Sharepoint pages could be geotagged and pop up in a FieldTrip like App would be really nice. Ideally, a FieldTrip app, or something related, which could pop up messages from any selected set of sources would be particularly cool. For work, my interest in data in the cube is not particularly geocoded. However, I did some experimenting with PostGIS a while ago and having a Postgres, or other database that could have geocoded data and pop up messages from that data could be very interesting. For example, MySQL with OpenGIS extensions support a distance calculations. For a starting point on this, I looked at New UDF for MySQL 5.1 provides GIS functions distance_sphere() and distance_spheroid()
Imagine census data, population health data, or health disparity data in a geocoded database. When you enter an area where some data point meets a certain criteria, a popup shows up on Glass.
"Woodbridge, CT: Zip 06525, 2010 Population 8,990 41.9% Graduate or Professional Degree, 22.4% Italien"
For that matter, a Fact Finder Google Glass App would be very interesting.
I suspect a lot of this stuff would be fairly easy to develop using the existing Mirror API. As an aside, I should really spend a little time getting up to speed in Go and Google's App Engine.
However, there are lots of other aspects of Glass that I'd love to see developed, which probably go beyond what you can do with the Mirror API. I don't know how much computing power is available on Glass, but I'd be very interested in seeing if Glass could do Eulerian Video Magnification. The health care applications would be fascinating.
I also like to think of Glass in terms of the larger set of technologies I'll refer to as wearable computing. I include things like the Pebble Watch and Fitbit. Imagine the capabilities of Glass, Pebble, and Fitbit combined into one device. You could go for a run, see your course, distance, speed and splits. You could add in information, like for a race course, how far you are to the next water stop, or how your doing against other people using the same device. It could monitor your heartbeat, perhaps even your blood oxygen levels, and give you warnings if you are over exerting yourself, or perhaps encouragement to push harder if you aren't exerting yourself as much as you should.
There's plenty more to think about for Glass Development, but these are a few of my starting interests. What do you think?
July 4th
Sing Around The Campfire
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/04/2013 - 09:08Last night, I had a strange dream, the details of which escape me, but two different ideas stuck with me.
First, it was winter time. We were wandering around some town where there were first night activities, not too much unlike Middnight on Main in Middletown. Fiona want s'mores, but we couldn't find any graham crackers or chocolate. By chance, we wandered into a cupcake store and convinced them to make up graham cracker and chocolate cupcakes which we cut in half and put the toasted marshmallows in. It seems like a good opportunity for a cupcake store, find campfires to sell graham cracker and chocolate cupcakes, or perhaps even organize a community event for toasting marshmallows and using their cupcakes.
This led to singing around the campfire. I know why it ended up this way, but the music was printed on flash paper which we threw into the fire at the end of the song adding special effects. Perhaps the fireworks from last night added to this image.
