Category: News

check out this post on Regions And Cities Working Together For A Better Future

Yesterday I attended a meeting of the Committee of Regions in Brussels. Organised by Age Platform Europe, the auditorium was packed with enthusiastic local and regional government officials representing around 300 municipalities, towns and cities from across Europe.

We learned about imaginative projects designed to match the needs of ageing communities to the mutual benefit of local businesses and solution providers.

Considering the diverse geographic, political and cultural background of the delegates it was heartening that general consensus seemed to be along the lines of: As we live longer, our aspirations should be expanding, necessitating new outlets for our skills and creativity in order to stay healthy, active and engaged members of society, long into what is currently termed ‘retirement’.

Yet, here we are, two decades into the twenty-first century with popular media still referring to the ‘silver tsunami’, a doom-laden metaphor coined in the late-twentieth century to describe population ageing.

Maybe it’s time to press reset, to redefine the common perception of age to stages of life (study, work, retirement). This wisdom, termed ‘chronologism’ by sociologist Michael Young, is also rooted in history and has long passed its’ sell by date.

Adopting a more agile approach to the way we manage our lives in what author Klaus Schwab has dubbed the ‘Era of Digital Transformation’ could have a significant impact on our health and wellbeing across the life course. Moreover, ‘Agile Ageing’, is a trillion-dollar business opportunity which cuts across health, social care and housing; and it is ripe for development.

Neighbourhoods of the Future

Earlier this year the Agile Ageing Alliance (AAA) published a white paper: Neighbourhoods of the Future- Better Homes for Older Adults – which concludes that a new breed of Cognitive Home could have a transformative effect on how we age. Facilitated by innovations in technology, business and service models, our homes could empower us to enjoy more meaningful, creative and independent lives well into old age; radically transforming our relationship with public services; creating new opportunities for learning and social engagement; leading to a reduction in the financial burden on State and citizens.

Smart business

Our homes are getting smarter through basic innovations such as smart meters and smart speakers, but this is just the beginning. Digital technologies, digital infrastructure and data production are already revolutionising our lives in so many ways and it won’t be too long before they are integral to our homes, enriching our lives and the lives of our friends and loved ones; facilitating a greater degree of interaction and communication, personalised support and preventative care, and enabling health and human services to be delivered remotely.

In truth, there’s a whole new phase of life up for grabs which nobody has catered for. Now, with the convergence of potentially game changing assistive technologies we have a golden opportunity to rethink the outlook for ageing populations and provide a much needed boost to the Silver Economy.

A 21st Century Cooperative

The big question is who will own our homes and of course the data we generate? For entrepreneurs and startups this is a fantastic business opportunity. But, to challenge the status quo I believe we need to rethink the development model. Why not involve public funders, SMEs, academic researchers and investors in a more equitable partnership with corporates, the stakeholders best qualified to create sustainable brands?

By investing in a cooperative for the 21st Century, in a spirit of open innovation and collaboration, corporate mentors will be able to tap into a fresh stream of passionate, innovative and potentially disruptive talent, while the SME gains access to a global ecosystem, assets, expertise and confidence.

If we don’t act, business as usual will see the more aggressive US tech giants establishing proprietary platforms and hoovering up promising incumbents, which will make it extremely difficult for European businesses to prosper thereafter. The land grab has started with the likes of Amazon, Google and Apple sizing up healthcare and the connected home, with voice activated products like Amazon Echo and Google Home making the early running.

We have been warned.

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check out this post on No Apple Isn’t Deliberately Slowing Your iPhone So You’ll Buy A New One, And Here’s Proof

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FELIX KRAUSE

Felix Krause

check out this post on You Can’t Always Get What You Want, But If You Try Sometimes You Might Find Technology Gives You What You Need

Whether the retail industry realises it or not, it stands at the forefront of the technology revolution.

One only needs to go to an industry show these days to see that the sheer number of tech firms in attendance trying to sell into that market is staggering. These tech firms, however, are all offering to do the same thing, provide data analytics to retailers about their customers.

This is all aimed at ensuring that people are exposed to more targeted and more effective adverts depending on past behaviour, preferences and what consumers may be interested in buying next. In effect, we have a multitude of companies who I assume make a profit as they still exist, serving up to retailers the answer to the question: “what do my customers want to buy next?”

This is in an attempt to reach what many consider the Holy Grail of retail – to know exactly what an individual wants. Leaving aside the dangers and ethical issues in collating such a huge amount of personal data on people, is this really the right direction for the tech industry to be going?

Retailers naturally want to sell. That is why they exist. On the surface, the collection of data on their customers makes perfect sense: The ability to know what the people they are targeting want should dramatically improve sales.

However, there is something wrong about the basic concept of data collection that is leading retail to a dead-end and, by extension, much of technological development. If all the focus is on giving people what they want today, is there any place for innovation? In other words – looking at what they will need tomorrow.

As Henry Ford said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

From the iPhone (more than 516 million sold) and iPad (more than 68 million sold) to the Rubik’s Cube (more than 350 million sold) and the Ford Model T (more than 15 million sold) the great success stories of retail came from innovation. It is what Peter Thiel called the “zero to one” moment, the creation of something that fulfils a need we didn’t know we had.

It is the fulfilment of need, not chasing wants that should be driving technology in this sector and all others. Technological development in this area is woefully lacking across all areas.

Take the example of selling ‘smart’ technology to the hotel industry. There is a multitude of companies offering smart doors, smart blinds, smart everything. All built around the idea of ‘isn’t this tech cool’ while seemingly all offering basically the same thing. Except one firm I have come across.

This company started from a customer-centric approach and considered what the hotels they targeted actually needed. The answer was to end one of the biggest costs for hotels the world over, with just $5 of technology. Their solution, an IoT system with motion sensors, timers and the like, stops the flow of water from hotel taps. This may sound like something small, but when a cup dropping into a sink and blocking the drain can lead to flooding that destroys 13 floors and costs millions to repair – as happened at one hotel – and flooding is the biggest damage cost to hotels the world over – it is a solution hotels need. Not shiny, not ‘exciting’, but needed.

This all poses the question, how do we get out of this blind alley of finding out wants, and get back to servicing needs?

The answer is to bring the person back in. People are not a collection of data points, no matter how much some may wish they were so. They are individuals who possess, as shown by Abraham Maslow, a hierarchy of needs. Rather than finding new and better ways to collect data on their customers, thereby allowing for them to be pushed more things they might want, retailers should find new and better ways to make their customers happy by fulfilling their actual needs.

One example comes immediately to mind: I was recently shopping for a new buggy for my daughter. As any parent will know, there is a monumental amount of choice in this area, with different qualities and price points. However, I only really ever considered one company, John Lewis. While at the more costly end for the type of buggy I wanted, I was happy to spend the extra. From start to finish in buying something and beyond the transaction itself, John Lewis cares about keeping its customers happy. To them, I am an individual that is treated as such, not just a set of data points to sell to.

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check out this post on When Will We Accept That Smartphones Are Addictive?

If you fail a university course or lose your job because you are so distracted by your smartphone then is the phone manufacturer to blame? Is addiction the problem?

It sounds like a stupid question, but think about it slightly differently. The tobacco and alcohol industries both invest heavily in programmes designed to prevent and treat addiction – likewise with the gambling industry. Any industry selling a product that could potentially be addictive is forced to take measures to prevent addiction, such as funding awareness programmes or treatment charities.

You can argue that the measures are not enough. Gambling companies want to encourage gambling, not stop their customers logging in and placing bets, but most organisations are responsible. The gambling companies don’t want a wave of online poker addicts meaning their entire industry is more heavily regulated or closed completely. The drinks companies want you enjoy a good night out, but not to the extent that you rely on drinking their products every night and sleeping rough. Addictive products have a place in society when they are used responsibly.

But are we ignoring the addictive nature of smartphones? Try taking away someone’s phone today and see how long they can cope without it. Look around on a train or bus and see how many people are lost to the real world, gazing blankly into their phone. Phone separation, or battery status, is now a genuine source of anxiety for many people.

The Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive recently said that constant use of an iPhone is actually misuse. He uses an Apple Watch to filter the number of notifications he personally has to interact with. What he is implying is that most people are constantly distracted by their phone. The product is being misused and this is the man who designed the iPhone.

When Tim Cook was asked if the iPhone creates poor social behaviour he dodged the question, but now we are a decade into the smartphone era the data is starting to arrive. The Wall Street Journal recently published research indicating that college students who left their phone outside the lecture theatre – and therefore were more focused on the class – scored a full grade higher. Academics believe that the intellectual reliance on smartphones is having a seriously adverse effect on our mental skills, such as problem solving and creativity.

Apple and Samsung do all they can to encourage us to use our phones even more. Researchers suggest that the average American interacts with their phone at least 80 times a day. When the Financial Times profiled how British teenagers relate to their phones, they found that 13-year-olds feel a closer relationship to their phone than to other family members. The phone has become a family member. What happens when we move beyond smartphones to wearables and implants?

I’ve talked for several years to corporate leaders about how they need to change the way they talk to customers because the way that customers talk to each other has changed. It’s obvious really. When is the last time you called a family member for a catch-up? In fact when is the last time you called anyone or answered a call from a number that isn’t in your contact list? Voice calls feel disruptive today when compared to texting. It’s a lot to expect the recipient of a call to drop everything they are doing so they can focus on a conversation with you.

Conversation is now largely through text and social networking platforms. Families are held together by Facebook. Kids share activities from their day via Snapchat. I’m not an anthropologist, but I can see that in just ten years there has been a complete revolution in how humans interact and communicate. There must surely be an effect on how we process information and learn – we just don’t know what will change at this point. It’s still too early and change is coming so fast.

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check out this post on Busting The Myths About Technology For Seniors

There is a sobering thought from telecoms giant Ericsson: “Technology will never move as slowly as it does today”.

This is good news for companies which want to sell faster internet connections, devices which can do more things and be more connected, but what about those people who are left behind?

It’s often thought that almost no-one is. Talk to social workers who look after the homeless and drug addicted and you’ll learn that even those who have nothing, have a mobile phone. But there are some people who are locked out by technology.

They are those for whom technology has passed them by. It’s important to remember that they are old, not stupid. It doesn’t help that many of the devices designed for older people are labelled “simple” with the negative connotation that the word might have when you think of a person being simple.

The two big myths about technology for older people are that the products need to be “simple” and that the customers need to be taught to use technology.

The thing which is missing here is familiarity. It’s not technology which is intrinsically difficult, it’s how you understand it. I collect typewriters and took my 1930s Imperial over to my mother so that she could teach me how to set the tab stops and margins. Hand a twelve year old a cassette recorder or millennial a slide projector and they will struggle.

What older people need is technology they feel comfortable with. It’s easy to think that double-tapping and swiping are “natural” but they are not. They are a learned behaviour. Indeed someone used to a mechanical world will press harder on a screen when an icon fails to react because they are used to having to force metal contacts together to make a connection. Pressing harder used to work.

There is a vicious circle of not making products older people can understand, because older people don’t buy them and so the customers get left further and further behind. The chip manufacturer MediaTek produces reference designs: recipes for how to use its chips so that phone manufacturers can make products with minimal research and design. The reference design for its ‘old people’ phones is appalling, but the majority of Chinese factories unfortunately follow the recipe to the letter.

It is not worth most manufacturers’ time in doing the raw research and developing the right solutions because the phones sell in comparatively small volumes and at very low prices. It’s worth making your £200 Android phone better and different when you will sell tens of thousands, but the low volume senior phones get unwanted and confusing features like microSD card slots and dual SIM, when deeply concave buttons would be of more use to a customer with shaky fingers.

A fantastic guru on accessible technology is Ian Hosking, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s department of engineering. He’s done a lot of work on the design and technology curriculum for A level students, for mobile phone companies and the National Health Service. He says that a familiar way of providing technology for older people is through providing an operator style system they can call. There are now services available which do this and he described them to me as “spot on as everyone knows what an operator is”.

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check out this post on For The Many, Not The Few: Water Resistance In The Mobile Industry

The media spotlight tends to shine most brightly on a limited number of high-end smartphones in the mobile industry. It’s easy to understand why; they come from manufacturers who have a significant portion of the global market, and are touted as having the latest ‘must have’ innovations and features.

What we are now beginning to see from the market leaders, are the number of changes to flagship smartphones beginning to gradually decline. The latest iterations are only bringing tweaks in design rather than wholesale changes to the table. This is to be expected as the trend and rate of innovation had to drop off at some point given the time and resources it takes to innovate and create new features.

In time you would expect these ‘flagship’ features to make their way down to the lower end of the market, especially water resistance which was applauded as one of the most innovative features in the high-end phone launches last year. But it is certainly a feature that shouldn’t be the preserve of the top of the range devices. Technologies that add water resistance to smartphones have been around for more than a decade, however they still aren’t the norm, or even available to smartphone users at multiple price points, with a limited number of exceptions.

Great expectations

Consumers though, are now starting to expect a level of water resistance as standard on their mobile phones, partly due to the high-profile launches of devices such as the iPhone 7 or Samsung Galaxy S8. As a result, consumer awareness has increased and started to build momentum so the expectation in mid to lower end of the market is creating a shift in demand. Some level of protection will soon be expected on devices to suit all budgets.

As liquid ingress is one of the most common causes of damage to devices, there is a clear need for this technology in the industry. A study from IDC states that the total number of devices shipped featuring water resistance increased 76% year on year in the first nine months of 2016, compared to the previous year. Water resistance is increasingly sought as an essential feature rather than a ‘nice to have’ for the modern consumer, providing protection against the spills and thrills of everyday life.

Breaking down barriers

There are however, a number of barriers to implementing water resistance technology in mid and lower tier devices:

1) Time; this type of technology takes time to both develop and then get to market, and on average can increase the testing cycle length of a product by 1-2 months and even more if the original design tests fail

2) Cost; mechanical solutions to prevent water ingress such as the seals and gaskets you see on a lot of high end devices are expensive due to the engineering, hardware and design compromises required to implement them

3) Materials; those used to manufacture mid-to-low tier devices do not often suit mechanical solutions such as an ‘O-ring’, which demand high-strength and rigidity. High-end devices usually have strong metal frames whereas lower-tier ones are usually made of more plastic, which are weaker under strain

Manufacturers and consumers both have a shared goal. They want a quality product regardless of price point, that meets the needs of the consumer.

Nanocoating technology offers a non-mechanical solution to the problems faced by both manufacturers and consumers. It protects the whole device, regardless of the materials and manufacturing scenarios used; are increasingly fast to apply and can drive economies of scale in terms of being able to coat high volumes of handsets in a short space of time. This makes it a much more accessible technology to the lower end of the market.

Democratisation as a process

That of internet access on handsets. A decade ago, the market rapidly changed from having few handsets with this capability (beyond very low functionality WAP), such as high-end devices from the likes of Blackberry, to it being ubiquitously available on pretty much every smartphone.

In a similar vein, Motorola has been offering water resistance capabilities on the majority of its handsets since 2011, yet few manufacturers have followed suit. There has been a paradigm shift now though, and I expect to see more manufacturers rolling out water resistance across their range and a rapidly increasing market share of handset devices at multiple price points.

Future-gazing

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check out this post on Why Aren’t We Listening To The Evidence On Practical Science?

We’ve all seen the headlines on school science practicals – they’re too boring, or too predictable, or just not happening often enough.

But when new research comes along, with evidence of what good practical science looks like, it seems we’re not listening.

Part of the debate about practical science rests on the fact that we don’t even agree on the basics: what makes a good practical lesson? What are practical lessons supposed to achieve? How can schools improve the quality of their practical science?

In 2015, Ofqual removed practical exams from science GCSEs and A levels. Instead, practical skills and knowledge are tested through written exams. Students are supposed to do some practicals – but if they perform poorly, it doesn’t affect their grade.

The goal was to give teachers the freedom to do more interesting, open-ended experiments with their students – not just follow recipes at the lab bench. But many people disagreed with these changes, including the Education Secretary at the time, Nicky Morgan, who said it would harm the next generation of scientists, and the Wellcome Trust who said the reformed A levels won’t reflect students’ abilities. The professional bodies complained that many of the existing practical exams for A level had already been interesting, open-ended investigations, exactly the kind of experiments that the changes were supposed to favour – and they had just been scrapped.

There is a risk that teachers use their new freedom to cut the number of practicals they offer students. Most teachers believe that for A levels, the changes have been positive – but not all do.

So, what is new?

The Gatsby Foundation’s new report, Good Practical Science, draws together research from around the world on good quality practical science at school. The report authors visited teachers and education experts in 19 schools in Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore and the USA – all countries which perform very highly on the PISA rankings that compare countries’ education systems.

Sir John Holman, who led the report, and his colleagues identified ten benchmarks for good practical work. The benchmarks are pragmatic and workable. They include things like ‘teachers know the purpose of any practical activity’ and ‘each lab has enough equipment for students to work in small groups’. Yet, a sample of 10% of the UK’s schools found that none of them achieved more than seven out of ten of the benchmarks. A third of UK schools didn’t achieve a single benchmark.

You might think these benchmarks are just for science teachers – that groups of science teachers and technicians need to get together and work through the benchmarks, one by one. But most of the Good Practical Science report’s recommendations are aimed at people who aren’t teachers, including government, Ofqual, Ofsted, teaching unions, teacher trainers, science professional bodies, funders, and others.

To achieve the benchmarks, science departments need support from this wider group – and that means those of us who work to support schools need to consider how we contribute to these recommendations.

Teachers face tough decisions every day: shall I do a practical or a revision class? Shall we arrange a trip to a local science centre or university, or will that disrupt the teaching timetable too much? We can’t just keep adding more and more tasks to teachers’ already hefty workloads.

At the British Science Association, we are committed to helping schools achieve these benchmarks. Benchmark Eight is ‘investigative projects: students should have opportunities to do open-ended and extended investigative projects’. For over thirty years, the British Science Association and partner organisations have provided the CREST Awards scheme, which supports five to 19-year-olds to do their own open-ended, investigative projects in science, technology, engineering or maths. We recently launched a new digital platform that enables all teachers, right across the UK, to sign up for a free CREST account. This year sees our biggest-ever programme of grants for schools, to enable them to do engaging, investigative science activities with their students and local communities.

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check out this post on This Elastic Glue Can Seal Wounds In Under 60 Seconds

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check out this post on This Elastic Glue Can Seal Wounds In Under 60 Seconds

Elastagen Pty Ltd

Elastagen Pty Ltd

Elastagen Pty Ltd