Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Kent Presents 2016 I just attended the second annual Kent Presents conference in Kent, Connecticut. It’s the brainchild of Donna and Ben Rosen, a New York power couple with connections to science, technology, politics, the arts and more. There were too many awesome talks to do them justice, but you are welcome to sample the session titles here . The talk that especially blew my mind was by MIT professor Dina Katabi . She and one of her graduate students demonstrated their Emerald technology, and it was the first time I’d seen this capability. I’m sure you remember the “Help I’ve Fallen and Can’t Get Up” TV commercial of late night fame. Dina’s question was: why doesn’t this work most of the time? The answer is that it’s hard to get people to wear something. The Emerald approach is to do away with the thing you wear. They place a low-power (far less than a wifi router) wireless beacon in your apartment, and it can track the exact location (including altitude) of up to five people. Ev...

We had a nice piece on Bookshare in the latest AARP Bulletin, entitled: Making Books Accessible for Those With Disabilities. We've been getting lots of questions about the article, including volunteer offers (yay!) and interest in getting Bookshare for older parents. We have shared with people that it's ok for children of disabled parents to download books for their parents, just as it's ok for parents to download books for children with disabilities. Our team has been explaining how to assist a disabled senior who doesn't have a PC, by empowering a PC-using child to download the book and load it onto a device like a Victor Stream (an ebook player that has a voice synthesizer that speaks our books). These kinds of devices are much more like the tape recorders and CD players with which non-PC users are familiar. Of course, we explain that access to Bookshare is only for the purpose of helping a person with a print disability. It's always exciting to be covered in...