CES: Home sensors could keep grandparents at home

Amid a vast sea of digital televisions, super-thin mobile phones and gaming consoles, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that consumer electronics comprises much more than just digital entertainment. Intel is making progress on a research project designed to make the "digital home" into a sensor network that could help take care of the looming problem of elder care, a company researcher said Thursday at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

In 2002, Intel announced an initiative to design a sensor network, backed by a PC's processing power, that would provide a steam of data to an elderly patient's doctors, family and friends. Eric Dishman, a social scientist leading the project at Intel, took the CES stage alongside Intel CEO Craig Barrett to outline some of the work Intel completed.

The company conducted research trials of the technology, which consists of a network of motion sensors that Dishman dubbed "motes," he said in an interview following Barrett's keynote. The motes themselves are relatively inexpensive, but they produce a great deal of data that must be organized and processed by a PC, he said.

For instance, concerned sons and daughters can monitor the location within the home of an elderly parent living alone, Dishman said. The network could also be used to remind individuals suffering from memory loss to take their medicine, or help ensure that seniors stay in touch with a social network of family and friends, he said.

Intel's interest is not in developing the sensor networks themselves, but rather creating yet another application where processing power is required to help run the system, Dishman said. For instance, a forthcoming Intel technology known as VT would allow PCs to take advantage of a separate virtual environment in which to run these applications, he said. VT is expected to appear in Intel chipsets in 2006, around the same time the next version of Microsoft's Longhorn operating system is slated to launch with software support for virtualization technology.

Many countries around the world are grappling with a rapidly aging population that is expected to live for a longer period of time than previous generations. Assisted-living facilities and nursing homes are often the only resort for the sons and daughters of older parents who need help taking care of themselves.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.