When the kitchen does the cooking

UNESCO Courier, Oct, 1998 by Sari M. Boren

Microchips may soon be in your shoes, monitoring your body temperature. But how long before they take you for a walk?

'Look, you're a doughnut." Professor Michael Hawley is stating his case for embedded technology. "You're a roundish little thing with a hole in the top and you pour food in and it comes out a hole in the bottom and you roll around a little during the day, but topologically speaking you're just a doughnut. And that's about all you know about the nature of what you eat and what comes out."

Hawley, a principal investigator for the Things That Think (TTT) consortium, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, is trying to make commonplace, everyday objects smarter to better understand and monitor our bodies. "We are incredibly naive about how our bodies work day to day. . . because we don't have any way to measure it or sense it."

For too long we have been forced to adapt to technology - to make our bodies and laves conform to clunky desktop computers, for example. We memorize long strings of web addresses to find cheap airfares but have trouble remembering where we left our keys.

The solution to these problems, at least in the United States, is more technology. Embedded technology that is smaller, smarter and, most importantly, everywhere.

Embedded technology - fitting out objects with computational enhancements that integrate digital and physical worlds - will move in two directions: out into our environment and closer to our bodies. According to Professor Mitchel Resnick, another TTT member, the growth of research in this field, which has substantial corporate support, can be tied to three developments: smaller and cheaper processors, better sensors, and continued advances in communication and networking technologies.

Hawley says, "It's becoming miniaturized so quickly that what used to be as big as a house and then as big as a file cabinet now sits on your desk, and then it's in your lap, then it's in your pockets and then it might as well be your pockets."

Back to the doughnut. One of Hawley's many research interests is body monitoring technology. His team has attached new body sensing technology to marathon runners and Mount Everest climbers. Subjects even swallowed a pill that measured body core temperature. Hawley foresees a time when we will monitor our health with a wristwatch device or a processor in the heels of our shoes, where there is room for chips. According to Hawley, health monitoring, for those who can afford it, will be "one of those really big inventions that is an indispensable part of everyday life. So that your shoes know more about you every day than the doctor has ever known before."

Making this technology more intuitive and comfortable is MIT graduate student Margaret Orth, who is developing electronic fabric. While she can imagine the practical uses of fabrics embedded with computational components, Orth is driven by expressive and emotional goals: to create clothing which can not only monitor heart rates but also emotions - or act as an interface for creative expression. She has already designed a musical jacket with a sewn-in keyboard, and believes that "by creating computational devices that are intimate with us physically, we begin to think about technology differently. We begin to think that it is accessible, reachable, creative and ultimately human."

The key to many embedded technologies is the communication between objects. Media Lab researchers have proposed giving every single object on the planet a unique Universal Binary Identification Code (UBIC), a series of numbers that identifies it to any other object or network that has a need to know.

Imagine a smart box of corn flakes. A sensor collects data about how much cereal is in the box. The processor "knows" when the box is almost empty and then communicates the information to the house network, which places an online order for a new box. Hold up a bottle of aspirin to your networked bathroom screen and the manufacturer's web site or information about drug interactions will appear. The goal is to make mundane tasks as easy and automatic as possible, freeing time for more entertaining or thoughtful pursuits.

Place a can of mushroom soup, an old bag of carrots and other food on your kitchen counter and the kitchen will suggest several recipes, then recite the instructions as you cook.

But if your house is automatically re-ordering everything from your food to your lipstick, how easily could stores or manufacturers construct a profile of your life? Will your home screens display advertisements to offset their cost, and will they make shopping so easy that you purchase more than you need?

As with many new technologies, we will need to balance the issues of access and privacy. Your car company may remind you when you need a tune-up, but by tracking your mileage they will also know when to send you advertisements for a new car.

Yet beyond these commercial interests, there is a wider concern lurking in the background of this smart new world. Media scholar and MIT literature professor Henry Jenkins reminds us that the history of technology has always been coupled with fear of the new tools. "What is basic to these fears is the sense that we are giving over too much control over our lives to technology." At the same time, "We have too long a history of watching technology fail in our daily lives."