Smart Advantages Make Life Easier For People With Disabilities.
As we age we have to accept that we generally start to lose our faculties. It’s natural and accepted that our hearing will go, our eyesight will become weak and our cognitive skills will also be less sharp from our middle age onwards, compared to our youth. Spectacles and hearing aids are no longer the cumbersome, unattractive ‘utility over aesthetic’ devices they once were. Now they not only serve their primary function of helping your see and hear, they look stylish (or are virtually invisible) and actively improve on what nature gave us.
My case in point here is Smart hearing aids and Smart glasses. I recently went to stay with family and noticed my uncle has Smart hearing aids. I’m not certain he’s got the hang of them yet as he was watching TV very low and told us off for talking too loud while we were watching England snatch victory from certain defeat at the hands of New Zealand.
Not being the most sociable of people it was no surprise that he would be in the same room, apparently paying attention, but if you got very close to him, you’d discover that he wasn’t following the conversation, he was listening to music from his phone which he had synced to his aids.
What this single example illustrates is the adaptability of Smart capabilities when used in conjunction with medical devices such as hearing aids and glasses. A hearing aid which is connected to the entire Smart Home Environment is a very discreet way for those of us with partial hearing loss to not only benefit from connectivity, but live it in an almost cyborg-like fashion. If you have aids you don’t need to check your phone or tablet for push notifications. You don’t need to worry if you’ve left your phone at home or it gets lost or stolen, as people who depend on hearing aids tend not to forget them, unless they want to. (Antisocial family elders with noisy nieces and nephews coming to visit will know what I’m talking about!)
So, as well as being able to listen to music wirelessly from your phone you can get all of your SMS delivered, burglar alarms and alerts that the CCTV has been triggered will sound but without drawing the attention of anybody else around you. You can then check in via your phone or computer to watch the footage or talk to whoever’s at your door via your Smart doorbell’s access control, you’re your CCTV interface.
Smart glasses offer all of this and more.
Fitted with speakers at the ends of the arms it’s possible to listen to music, podcasts, alerts and alarms, while they also have a built in mic so you can take calls or talk to people on your property from anywhere with a GSM, 4G or wifi connection. They also feature video playback too, so you can, with a single device, watch the CCTV footage, movies, read texts, and with Speech to Text reply in kind, and simply see, as many Smart glasses come with the option of a plain glass, tinted glass or prescription lens. All you need do is take them along to your optometrist when you get fitted and ask.
Always Stay In Communication
So Smart glasses aren’t just there for entertainment and novelty value. They can be real reading glasses with bifocal or varifocal lenses which add immersive connectivity to your user experience. Yes you can use them for watching videos, playing games and checking your texts, but they also offer the user so much more.
The usability of Smart Glasses is especially apparent for users who have limited problems with their fine motor skills. People who are experiencing failing sight and hearing (those speakers on the arms can be used as hearing aids too) will often be experiencing loss of dexterity as age related illnesses such as Parkinson’s start to affect their bodies. So if tremors and poor grip make a phone hard to use the natural option is going to be a pair of glasses which can show texts, write them as you speak, play music and video, all from a unit which rests snugly on your nose and is easily controlled by your speech.
Live Smarter, Live Better
No doubt I’ve quoted “ Amber Case saying that “we’re all cyborgs now but it becomes increasingly true. The augmentation and improvement we see as we install electronic and mechanical elements into our bodies and around our homes can be seen to appreciably make our lives better, making it easier to adopt and move into this brave new world, powered by the white heat of technology.
Originally published at https://www.briantcomms.com on July 18, 2019.
