Telecom models the future

Miki Szikszai demonstrates the home lounge technology. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Telecom has its own Willie-Wonka room, not made of edible delights but a microcosm of what a room in the future may look like.

When you walk in to what Telecom calls the "ideatorium", it looks benign, like any comfortable lounge, complete with couches, lamps and low ceiling and some electronic gear.

Then you look more closely at the electronic gear - the webcam in the corner, the device that looks like a TV but is different, and a few other interesting pieces of technology - and it becomes a bit more alien.

Miki Szikszai is head of the emerging technology team at Telecom, and spends quite a bit of time in the ideatorium testing inventions with different age groups.

His brief is to look into people's behaviours, social trends and overseas trends, study how different generations learn and adapt to technology, and create technology focused on communication for the future that suit New Zealanders.

He has found that Generation X (people born in the 1960s and 1970s) and baby-boomers tend to complete a task, but younger generations go off on tangents and post more detail about themselves on social websites.

Every little behavioural difference has an impact on how the technology is invented, says Szikszai.

"You have this phenomenon at the moment, which is kids that are being born are completely surrounded by technology, so they get stuff really quickly, but the flip side is that if your stuff is bad, they will tell the world about it."

The technology is in the test-tube phase, so may not even go to market, but it offers a glimpse of what major telecommunication companies are taking seriously.

Telecom is looking into how it would work putting web-cameras into elderly people's homes that would connect to a device it has invented that serves as a computer/tv/photo album/music player.

The connection to the camera would allow families to monitor parents at home 24 hours, and give elderly people more independence by delaying the step into rest-homes, says Szikszai.

Elderly people are living longer, with less money per day of their life, so there is a need for more preventive and home care in the ageing sector.

"Most elderly people are not particularly tech savvy but they want to remain independent," says Szikszai.

He believes the health sector could use the technology as well. Doctors would be able to check to see if a person had taken medication.

The technology would have to be "permission-based - you have to let the person know you are putting the camera in there. It has to be totally transparent. All successful internet communities which are based on publishing your identity in some way are all based on trust, so as soon as that trust breaks down, that community falls down."

University of Auckland science and technology lecturer Steven Matthewman said it raised ethical issues around giving consent.

"Elderly people may not be fully aware of the technology and how it works, and know enough to consent to it. They may put it in their house to keep their family happy."

Quite a few technologies are put out in the market for safety purposes but then they become systems of control, says Matthewman. "We can never predict how a technology is going to be used."

The technology would be relatively cheap compared to rest-homes, where you can pay $700 a week for care, so it may be that some of the people should have full-time care, but a family would save money by installing a camera.

It also requires family members to watch the camera the whole time.

"If you forget to watch it, then what happens?" asks Matthewman.

"It doesn't give you the ability to enhance the relationship, there would be a tendency to just watch your relatives from a distance, so that the technology has the opposite effect, creating distance and isolation for the person."

The web-camera would be connected to another of Telecom's inventions, a home device, essentially a computer hard-drive, that has many functions, particularly entertainment.

"With MySky moving into homes, you suddenly have a hard drive of media stored in the home, which opens up a lot of possibilities," says Szikszai.

Telecom is investigating ways to have an entertainment program on the hard-drive, and be able to watch it somewhere else in the house, away from the home, and create opportunities for companies to advertise.

The ideatorium has a computer hard-drive where you can watch TV, pause the TV if someone comes in the room, and record TV channels simply.

Technology architect Rob Inskeep says that if you are interrupted - by the children, for example - it would allow you to pause the program, settle the children and go back to the TV.

The device has a guide to all the TV channels, set out in easy-to-use form where you can look at the week's guide and record whatever programme you want immediately, says Inskeep.

"The unit is attached to your home network which goes into your internet. You can play pictures while listening to music, using memory cards from digital cameras."

Telecom is also investigating technology options in the rural sector, and has already done some work with Massey University to prototype a certain type of radio frequency identification for farm animals, and ways that farmers can manage the time they spend in the office and on the farm.

"If you can guarantee what a cow was doing from the time it was born, through the processing, then there is an absolute premium we can charge as a nation to do that," says Szikszai.