Mobile Future headed over to Apps 4 Access last
week to check out the latest in mobile disability applications. The event hosted by Disability Power & Pride in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Troy Cross from Vlingo demos audio-to-text messaging on his mobile phone:
Larry Lewis from Flying Blind, LLC shows off an alpha braille controller:
David Pohelman shows off an iPhone that speaks back to the user:
Lisa and Jeffrey Johnson from Grembe Inc. show off iCommunicate:
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski issued a statement last Thursday outlining the Commission’s ongoing efforts to achieve the much-applauded National Broadband Plan (NBP).
"We are putting the National Broadband Plan into action," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. "The Commission's Bureaus and Offices have already begun executing on the strategy the National Broadband Plan lays out to connect all Americans to broadband, unleash innovation and investment, enable job creation, and ensure a bright future of economic opportunity and prosperity."
And to ensure these goals — employment, continued innovation and investment, the FCC must tread carefully among potential regulation landmines. We want to nurture the broadband sector, which has been a tremendous boon to our country and economy — not stifle it with unnecessary roadblocks.
Ever see a pothole or a tree that's fallen in the road and think, "Someone ought to fix that"?
Well, if you're in Washington, DC, you're in luck. All you need to do is snap a photo with your PDA and using the city's DC 311 mobile app, pair it with a GPS location. You then upload it into a local government database. This also works for graffiti, broken parking meters and any other public nuisance.
Other cities from New York to San Francisco have also moved to harness the power of mobile consumers. The practical result, as CNN reports is that:
[T]ech geeks transform banal local government spreadsheets about train schedules, complaint systems, potholes, street lamp repairs and city garbage into useful applications for mobile phones and the Web. The aim is to let citizens report problems to their governments more easily and accurately; and to put public information, which otherwise may be buried in file cabinets and Excel files, at the fingertips of taxpayers.
San Francisco and other cities are trying to develop a national standard for municipal government data. That way, a mobile app that tracks, say, bus service in San Francisco could also be used in any other city. That could enable cities that cannot afford to develop their own mobile apps to benefit.
Hats off to the White House for embracing mobile as a
key communications tool in areas with
minimal Internet access. A White
House Blog post details the efforts of the White
House and State Department New Media teams to ensure that Tuesday's
speech by President Obama was made available to the Afghan people via mobile
technology.
Looking at
data on Whitehouse.gov, [there is not] a lot of traffic coming from
Afghanistan and Pakistan because Internet penetration
in the region is relatively low at 2% and 11% respectively. However, mobile
penetration is much higher. 52% of the 177 million people in Pakistan have at least 1 mobile device and 30% of
the 28.4 million in Afghanistan. Given this trend, [the White House]
produced short video clips of the President's segment to Afghans and had it
dubbed in Arabic,
Dari,
Pashto,
and Urdu
in order for them to be distributed locally on mobile devices. Given the small
screens on phones, subtitling wasn't an appropriate option. The original version
in English
is also available.
Back in August, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
approved three Notice of Inquiries (NOI) covering issues on innovation and
investment in wireless; competition in the wireless industry; and consumer
protection and access to information about communications services. Mobile
Future took the opportunity to respond to the FCC's investigations with reply
comments filed on behalf of the coalition. The reply comments focused on the recent paper
sponsored by Mobile Future, "Why the iPhone Won't Last Forever and What the
Government Should Do to Promote Its Successor." You can read Mobile Future's
comments here.
The Broadband Breakfast Club hosted an important dialogue yesterday focused on the future of telemedicine. Billed as “Setting the Table for the National Broadband Plan: Health Care,” the panel discussion included four physicians, who – along with Drew Clark, Editor and Executive Director of BroadbandCensus.com – examined how the development of a national broadband plan will affect health care delivery and outcomes.
The panelists included:
-Dr. Adam Darkins, Department of Veterans' Affairs
-Col. Ron Poropatich, M.D., Department of the Army
-Dr. Jay Sanders, Global Telemedicine Group; the "father of telemedicine"
-Dr. Ted Eytan, Medical Director for Delivery Systems Operations Improvement, Kaiser Permanente
Dr. Sanders was quick to point out that telehealth is an “old idea,” something he’s been working on for nearly 40 year. Though widespread adoption of telemedicince still hasn’t been realized, Dr. Sanders is optimistic about its future and sees broadband as the “umbilical cord” of telehealth. He also predicted that the smartphone will be the key for both health monitoring and the delivery of medical information such as test results and prescriptions.
Dr. Darkins brought up another “old idea” -- hospitals, which he described as an “outdated, Victorian models for health care.” Dr. Darkins argued that the delivery of medical services is moving away from the hospital model toward home-, school-, and work-based care that’s focused on prevention.
Dr. Eytan cited studies showing that telehealth application successfully lowers costs and improves health outcomes. The full panel agreed that health care delivery is shifting from a model based on one doctor’s opinion toward a more advanced “team approach” in which several health care professionals work together in diagnosing and treating a patient.
When an audience member asked about the obstacles preventing widespread adoption of telemedicine, Dr. Sanders responded that outdated regulations, such as state licensing requirements, and CMS reimbursement rules are standing in the way.
The application examples and costs savings potential were so compelling that several audience members asked variations of the question: Why isn’t everyone using telemedicine?
As the health care reform debate moves forward in Congress, we should all be asking this.
Webcasts of the Broadband Breakfast Club are available on the BroadbandCensus.com channel on TV Mainstream <http://www.tvmainstream.com/series/bbclub/.
There are some nice mobile events in the District next week. As always, we wanted to make sure you knew the 411!
dcMOMO - Monday, June 22
Mobile Monday DC has a new name and they will be holding an event on Monday evening at Qorvis Communications. The event will focus on mobile advertising and whether it is recession-proof. The speakers for the evening are:
Robert Samuels, Director of Mobile Products, New York Times
Anurag Mehta, SVP, Sales and Business Development, Mobile Posse
Marcus Startzel, Senior Vice President of Sales, Millennial Media
You can rsvp for Monday's dcMoMo event here or on Facebook.
mHealth on the Hill - Wednesday, June 24
With major health care reform on the horizon, CTIA is holding an event on Wednesday that will further examine the opportunities for wireless in the health care sector. Dr. Eric Topol, who was a keynote at CTIA's Spring show, will get the conversation started with Congressman Adam Smith. Dr. Topol captivated the audience with his presentation in Las Vegas that demonstrated the great potential for mHealth. I expect he will do it again next week!
The mHealth event runs all morning and has quite a dynamic agenda. You can find all the details right here.
The medical world is always one to be on the cutting edge of
new technologies so it is no surprise that 64 percent of doctors nationwide are
using smartphones in their practice.
Over time, the emblematic pager will be a thing of the past-a distant
beep dating any medical drama TV show.
According to a recent Washington
Post article, mobile devices are quickly becoming pivotal instruments in
doctor-patient interactions. From
pulling up instructional diagrams to researching drug-to-drug interactions,
smartphone technology is arming doctors with vital information at their
fingertips. This means doctors can make
smart, informed decisions instantly, with the patient by their side. Thankfully, it also means they can show us
something to decipher often tedious medical-ese.
Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist at George Washington
University, gives a
pretty amazing first person account of how the smartphone can make a difference
in a life and death situation:
One Saturday afternoon... Reiner was
having lunch at a deli when his BlackBerry began to beep. It was a patient's
EKG, sent to him by an emergency room physician. Reiner pulled up the graphic on his handheld
device and saw that the patient was on the brink of a severe heart attack. He rushed to the hospital to perform
surgery.
Real-time data can make all the difference when seconds
count. I'd like to see a pager do that!
It has been a week since the CTIA show and I'm still digesting all of the great keynotes and educational panels I attended in Las Vegas.
In any case, if you are in DC and you were not able to make it to CTIA 2009, please join the conversation on Wednesday, April 15, at the Social Media Club DC. As futurists know, the mobile-social sector is hot and Larissa Fair (Director, SMC-DC) has assembled a panel that will take a look at where we are and where we are going in the sector. The panel for the evening includes: Chris Hopkinson (DubMeNow), Barg Upender (Intridea), and Dave Levy (Edelman Digital Public Affairs). I will be moderating the panel discussion.
Some of the topics and questions I hope to dive into next Wednesday are:
Mobile Marketing - Specifically, integrating mobile into your current interactive and communication efforts...
Perspectives on Apps - How has the "open" environment created opportunities? Are developers (such as Intridea) seeing an increased interest from content providers to develop mobile apps (examples)?
Mobile Social Movement - What's the future look like (beyond twitter and facebook) and what does this mean?
m-health - An embryonic industry about to burst? This was a big topic at CTIA...
Any questions you would like me to ask the panel? Feel free to reach me via email - chris(at)mobilediner.com
I hope you'll consider joining us next Wednesday night at USTA. Once again, all the information is here.
I recently had the opportunity to speak to some Communication Directors on the Hill about the mobile-social revolution and how they can augment their traditional communication efforts with the mobile media channel. In preparing for this educational forum, I found the amount of new applications for wireless to be accelerating as compared to last year. As we head west for the CTIA show, I look forward to reporting on the hottest new applications as well as the expected launch of BlackBerry App World - BlackBerry's response to the iPhone app store and the Android marketplace for G1 users.
In any case, two apps that had some buzz last week that I thought you would find of interest -
Google Voice Search & My Location
Google announced last week support for "Voice Search" and "My Location" for BlackBerry. It is a nice application that allows you to "voice search" and find what you are looking for based on your current location. For instance, if I'm in Woodley Park in DC and say "Open City Diner"- it provides all the information for it - even if you don't have the exact address. Yummy!
Charmin Restroom Finder
How many times have you been somewhere and needed to know where the nearest restroom was located? Well, Charmin has come to the rescue.
Last week the company got some ink for being behind this application for the iPhone and BlackBerry. Aside from providing the location of the restroom, it was also give you some idea as to the cleanliness of the facilities. Cult of Mac reports that - "Sit or Squat has compiled information on more than 52,000 toilets in 10 countries worldwide."
Stay tuned for reports from Vegas and I imagine I'll be using both of these apps very soon!
comments | Permalink
Tags: Applications, Disability community, Mobile Applications, Mobile Future, Smartphone, DC, Mobile Ability