Over the past few weeks I've been playing around trying to repurpose old hardware. Mostly CD and DVD drives and they're chock full of useful parts - lasers, motors, lenses and so on... That and a bit of Arduino prototyping to come come up with a bag of junk that could be sent to undergrads next year. Motivation came from the COVID-19 teaching experience. At least in physics online classes proved difficult and labs unworkable. Some folks at Caltech suggested a different lab experience where the student assembles or even invents a piece of experimental apparatus to use to make some measurements. The fact that most students have smartphones - basically computers with a number of interesting sensors and a network connection - makes this even more appealing. It probably isn't appropriate for 101 non-major courses, but it may make a better lab experience for more advanced physics and engineering students. The potential for real learning rather mechanically following directions is great - assuming you have good instruction to go along with it. There's also the possibility of creating inexpensive lab kits for high schools. High school lab experiments are ridiculously expensive and inflexible. There are a number of interesting directions. It's been fun and several of us are in exploration mode.
I need to add I'm a privileged white male with the ability to take a bit of time and focus on this kind of craziness during an epidemic. Too many people aren't in that position.
The project reminded me of some attempts to help my mother when she was dealing with dementia. She became forgetful, so we'd make lists. Then she lost the ability to read so picturegrams. All along the way glasses, remote controls, almost anything that wasn't nailed down managed to get misplaced. And then there was medication. She went into a managed care facility. Life was less stressful, but she was constantly misplacing things and forgetting how to operate the style telephone and TV remote. I started building gadgets to help out, but by the time one sort of worked, she had lost more capability.
I've thought about it a fair amount since. The facilities are expensive - at least $80,000 a year and usually more. What could you change to allow someone stay at home a few years longer? Even if it cost ten or twenty thousand dollars, it could save a lot of money and be better psychologically. (Greg Vesonder has done thinking along these lines)
Om and I were talking about where the local and personal application of "intelligence" is a big thing, perhaps the biggest thing, for Apple going forward. With their sensors and local connectivity outside of the cloud, the iPhone and Apple watch have great senior citizen potential. The iPhone has machine learning hardware. Combine this with ultrawideband location and a dozen applications immediately leap to mind.1 Fertile ground indeed.
Of course the trick is to stay healthy and sharp as you get older. It turns out there's a wonder drug which, taken regularly, doesn't have negative side effects. The AMA now considers physical exercise a powerful drug - often with superior results than conventional drugs. It has been shown effective in lowering the probability of several types of cancer, heart diseases, many forms of dementia, and is even associated with "happiness". You don't need a lot. Walking enough counts and you get it for free if you use a bicycle. But you have to do it.
Many people use smartphones , watches or dedicated fitbit type devices for motivation.It turns devices aren't universally motivating over time, but if they work for you it's money well-spent. The sensors and processing can be useful for athletes training at the amateur level, but not at the elite level. That's a separate and fascinating story at the frontier of sports science these days.
Finally it's becoming clar that certain types of mental stimulation help push back the onset of dementia. Forget the memory games marketed for the purpose - they've been shown to be ineffective. What you want is something that challenges you - something you've never done that you have really work at. Anecdotally creatives who constantly push boundaries are in good shape. I suspect it doesn't matter how creative you are - just the fact that you're forcing a lot of new neural connections. The brain stays plastic for a long time.
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1 Current generation iPhones have the U1 ultrawideband chip. They haven't done much with it, but it makes a lot of sense for augmented reality, ID verification and object location. I wrote a bit on UWB a few months ago.
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