I was thinking today about my silly invention of “smart pants” so that people could just type on their pants. Then I realized something crucial:
Who needs pants!
Seriously, to hell with pants! Down with pants!
Not to mention down with keyboards.
Instead maybe we’ll have little motion detecting rings on our fingers and will just make the barest hints of typing motions. The micro-intent to move will be sensed by the set of rings with tiny wireless transmitters. Or for the prototype, you could have the rings wire up like flexible brass knuckles to a bracelet with the transmitter.
So if I end up like this eventually, I won’t have to type 15 words a minute, and I hope also not to talk like a Dalek.
Why have typing motions at all, then? It might be important to have some kind of physical motion and body memory.
And as I contemplate this Ankle-Foot Orthosis that will soon be mine, I wonder why the thing, cool as it looks (yay for rehab equipment with style!) doesn’t have all kinds of electronic sensors in it. I don’t ask for it to move my foot around, or walk for me like a real exoskeleton would. But I WANT ITS DATA. Data, goddamn it! Think of all the cool data it could be collecting on my gait, on the strength of my hamstrings as my back toe is pushing off. Instead of whining that as the day goes on my leg gets weaker, I could just have a handy graph on my blog so that anyone who cared to know would see how well I’m walking. I noticed at BlogHer that there were exercise pedometer sorts of things that upload and track your workouts on a website and even on social sites. How about for rehab too?
I hope to see some of these mad inventions in the next few years.
Pretty Lady’s healthcare plan takes this argument fully into account. To create a truly effective universal healthcare system, we must subsidize the consumers, not the health insurance companies, or Medicaid. This creates healthy competition among providers, while making certain that everyone is cared for, and has as much say as possible in what kind of care they get.