Caring For Relatives By Robot
10/20/2014 @ 12:47PM
Caring For Relatives By Robot
The days of extended independent living, where a robot
could allow you to have a quasi-physical presence with a distant relative, talk
to them, perform chores for them and possibly even have physical contact with
them, is around the corner. At the Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum last
week in Chicago, I caught a glimpse of the future and it isn’t far off.
Even though conference sponsor Cisco admits that the IoT
is overhyped, the progress is real and the effect on industries and society
will be profound. Goldman Sachs is predicting by 2020 there will be 28 billion
connected devices. 300,000 devices per hour are being connected to the Internet
according to Wim Elfrink, Cisco’s Executive Vice President of the Industry
Solutions Group and Chief Globalization Officer—he’s the visionary for IoT.
According to Elfrink the IoT is being adopted faster than any technology in
history. Essentially what he and everyone else is saying is that in the future,
anything that can be connected to the Internet will be.
The sense I got from walking around the conference was
that only a tiny sliver of the IoT market consists of the sexy and buzzworthy
devices like the Nest Thermostat or the gadgets from SmartThings (just acquired
by Samsung). Most of what I saw are really hairy and exceptionally complex
networking and data analysis tools. Very geeky stuff.
I spent some time talking to Youssef Saleh, Sr. Vice
President and General Manager of the Remote Presence Business Unit for iRobot
Corporation. iRobot recently announced their Ava 500 video collaboration robot.
Initially I wasn’t too impressed because I saw a prototype of something very
similar at the AT&T Foundry Innovation Center in Palo Alto, California
nearly three years ago. But I’m glad I spoke to Youssef because what wasn’t
apparent was the way iRobot has combined their robotic navigation technology
with a telepresence system. Imagine the offspring of the Roomba and Skype and
you’ll picture the Ava 500.
Video conferencing systems are static, and they require
someone on the receiving end to do something to complete the connection…whether
that’s entering a passcode, logging on to a website, or whatever. The Ava 500
does what you’d expect it to do. If you’re an executive in New York and you
want to participate in a meeting in San Jose, the Ava 500, like other
telepresence robots on the market, let’s you have a presence in the meeting,
see and listen to what is going on and contribute.
Other telepresence robots let the remote user control the
whereabouts of the robot, but he/she needs to navigate. With the Ava 500, the
robot learns the environment it is in. So a remote user could initiate a
connection to the robot and then instruct it, through a mobile app, to go to
the Board Room and off it would go. It would get there itself and it would do
so in a safe manner (the Roomba part). And it doesn’t need to be connected to
the network while it navigates.
The Ava 500 looks like a piece of office equipment. It
isn’t as anthropomorphic as one would expect, but I’m sure in a product
generation or two it will acquire a persona that engenders more warmth. Whereas
most robots can be controlled remotely, the unique characteristic of the Ava
500 is that it knows its own environment and can wander about just by telling it
where you want it to go.
When Youssef and I were together in the basement of the
Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, he was able to virtually knock on the
door of his colleague at iRobot headquarters in Bedford, Massachusetts. What
impressed me about the system was that Youssef didn’t need to know where the
robot was in their complex in Massachusetts. He just instructed it from Chicago
to go Joe’s office and off it went. The system, like with Uber, knows where the
robots are and automatically sends the one that’s available and closest.
I quickly imagined that after he got done talking to Joe
in Bedford, he could have done the same thing with a colleague in Sydney. With
only the slightest exaggeration, he could really be in two places at one time.
A day later, curiously, at the Chicago Venture Summit,
Travis Kalanick, the CEO and co-founder of Uber gave the luncheon keynote talk.
He got a chuckle out of the audience when he said, “If I press this button, I
can make a car move in Beijing.” iRobot is doing the same thing in a more
intimate way.
And just as Uber has to know where cars are when you
request one, the iRobot system has the same intelligence within a building or
campus.
My imagination quickly saw the day when the Hyatt Regency
Chicago, one of the largest hotels in the U.S., would have a bevy of Ava 500s
available for its clients, much like it has AV equipment and computers. If
someone wanted to “attend” the next IoT World Forum, they could do so by
renting an Ava 500 from the Hyatt—not by flying to Chicago and getting a room
in the hotel. It wasn’t lost on me that we were having this conversation in
Chicago right at the same time as the Ebola crisis was hitting the United
States and the stock market was swooning over fears about what an epidemic
might do to the travel industry. Youssef, without feigning any glee over other
people’s misfortune, clearly understood that this was a big opportunity for
telepresence.
Says Saleh, “Enterprises are global, distributed. The Ava
500 allows you to be in multiple places at once.”
Because the iRobot can navigate its space without being
connected to the Internet, the myriad ways in which this technology could be
used to remotely monitor and communicate with elderly people at home jumped to
the forefront of my imagination. Add to it a robot’s ability to perform a
task—like dispense medicine, scratch someone’s back or sweep the floor, and a
Jetson’s like future doesn’t seem that far off.
Neil Kane (@neildkane) is the president of Illinois
Partners which helps companies, universities and investors with innovation
strategies and technology commercialization.
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