17 May 2016 – I often spend part of my weekend trolling arXiv.org, Cornell University’s open access e-prints to computer science, mathematics, physics, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics. It was started in August 1991 as a highly-automated electronic archive and distribution server for research articles. It is a treasure trove of research-in-progress, much of it appearing months later … years, sometimes … in standard technology media like MIT Technology Review, Nature, Scientific American, etc. I have learned about advanced developments in facial recognition, machine learning, medical physics, numerical analysis, photo tagging, text analytics, etc. before they hit the mainstream press.
And sometimes I have learned the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and wheelchair users can now find themselves propelled along it at the whim of a remote user. Jiajun Shen and his colleagues have unveiled their concept for “A telepresence wheelchair for elderly people” in a paper published on arxiv.org.
The innovation combines a motorized wheelchair, a remote control system and a telepresence rig that, in principle, allows someone to control the wheelchair while chatting face-to-screen with the person sitting in the chair.
But I can’t help but ask “what could possibly go wrong?” In an era where there are public databases of unsecured baby cameras, through which you may watch someone else’s children sleep from the comfort of your home, the temptation to follow it up by taking a stranger for a spin in their wheelchair could be too much for some to resist.