Here are two of the new devices you can use to remotely watch over a loved one.
Sonamba
For about $200 (plus monitoring fees of about $100 per month), you can buy any number of home monitoring devices that use sensors to alert caregivers if their charge has fallen or might need medical attention, according to Caring.com . But for an additional $349.99, you can upgrade to the Sonamba , which uses sound and motion sensors to monitor all movements, alerting caregivers with periodic text messages like "all is well," or "attention needed."
The Sonamba, which looks like a digital picture frame, is placed somewhere in the house; smaller sensors are placed in other rooms so that the device can theoretically monitor most of a home. Something else experts like: It doesn't require technical expertise on the part of the patient. Although the $549.99 price and the $39 monthly fee are higher than those of many other devices on the market, the Sonamba does have additional bells and whistles — like reminder messages about doctors' appointments and medication routines.
Lifecomm mPERS Lifecomm's new mobile personal emergency response system (mPERS) uses cellular network signals to transmit messages to a caregiver in the event of a fall. Just slightly bigger than an iPod Nano, the wearable battery-powered belt clip, watch or necklace has as an embedded GPS (in case help is needed away from home) and a sensor that tracks the number of steps a person takes, along with their activity level. Veer from the norm and the device sends a caregiver alert. It also comes with online support tools where caregivers can sign up for things like low-battery alerts.
The system works well as long as it's in range of a strong cell signal — and there's still no getting around the fact that its owner must remember to wear it to get the high-tech benefits. The company says the device will be "comparable" in price to other systems (Wellcore offers a similar product for $199 with a $49.99 monthly fee).
Pingdom, an Internet monitoring service, corralled a number of research reports and company statistics to create a picture of the year in online stuff. Here's the data:
Internet Users
1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
Email
107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
480 million – New email users since the year before.
89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
Websites
255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.
Social Media
152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet
25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.
Videos and Pictures
2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
I've been predicting that cell phones will become the new laptop, and here's a new model that is leading the way. Popular Mechanics reports from the Consumer Electronics show:
In the tablet free-for-all that promises to characterize 2011, the Motorola Xoom will be a principal challenger to the Apple iPad.
It hits one cutting-edge mark after another: Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, ample power with a dual-core 1 GHz processor, a GB of RAM, and both front- and rear-facing cameras for video conferencing as well as shooting photos. The screen is big: 10.1 inches with a wide 16:10 aspect and a resolution of 1280 x 800.
For now, the Xoom is a step ahead of the competition when it comes to connectivity. The first Xooms will launch on Verizon’s 3G network in the first quarter of 2011, and the company promises that those units can be upgraded to the 4G LTE network in the spring. (Units shipping in spring will be on 4G from the start.) And HDMI compatibility means that the Xoom can share its video with a home entertainment center.
This fall, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology announced that it had created the world's fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, which clocks in at 2.5 petaflops (or 2,500 trillion operations) per second. This is the shape of the world to come—but not in the way you might think.
Powering the Tianhe-1A are some three million processing cores from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley company that has sold hundreds of millions of graphics chips for videogames. That's right—every time someone fires up a videogame like Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, the state of the art in technology advances.
Not the first time, Andy Kessler reports in The Wall Street Journal.
Consider the Apple iPhone, often touted as the tech symbol of our era. It's actually more evolutionary than revolutionary. Much of its technology—color LCD displays, low power usage, precision manufacturing—was perfected for hand-held videogames like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, which sold in the tens of millions. Think about how much more productively workers are now able to communicate because of some silly games.
We've only just begun, Kessler writes.
Videogames will influence how next-gen workers interact with each other. Call of Duty, a military simulation game, has a mode that allows players to cooperate from remote locations. In World of Warcraft, players form guilds to collaborate, using real-time texting and talking, to navigate worlds presented in high-resolution graphics. Sure, they have funky weapons and are killing Orcs and Trolls and Dwarves, but you don't have to be a gamer to see how this technology is going to find its way into corporate America. Within the next few years, this is how traders or marketers or DNA hunters will work together.
The New York Times lists online backups for your computers as a must if you want to get the most out of technology:
Why: Because photos are not the only important things on your computer. With online backup services, you do not have to buy any equipment; you just install software, which sits on secure servers and runs in the background, regularly updating a mirror image of all your files.
How: Go to sosonlinebackup.com. Pay $80 a year. Install the software. Sleep easy.
I don't know why they selected SOS Online, but that's the choice as well at PC Magazine.
$9.95 a month for five PCs and up to 50GB
SOS still offers more than other online backup providers: multiple PC coverage, external and network drive backup, a local backup app, and an excellent iPhone app. Its Live Protect that watches folders for file changes and backs up immediately. In sum, SOS delivers more than any other online backup service.
The Times seems to have the $80 price right, according to SOS. The company says that's enough for
75,000 documents, 15,000 photos and 15,000 songs.
Whew! I've got 14,999 songs.
PC Magazine compares all the services and tells you what to look for here.
