The Future of Assistive Tech Is Smart

the-future-of-assistive-tech-is-smart photo 1

This month's cover story for the PC Magazine Digital Edition has been a long time in the making. I first started covering assistive technology back in the 1990s at Computer Shopper, the 1,000-plus-page bible for direct PC sales. The topic was important to me, so I snuck coverage into the advertising-heavy magazine's voluminous back pages.

Since then, though, the definition of assistive technology has changed a lot. The voice-driven interfaces that were a pipe dream in the 1990s, for instance, are now built into smartphones that are given away for free with a two-year service contract. And new challenges have emerged, too: Touch-centered interfaces are wonderful, but they are distinctly unhelpful to the blind.

The story, "Augmented Ability: How Smart Tech Is Making Assistive Technology Smarter," shows how far we have come—and how far we have yet to go.

Subscribe today to the PC Magazine Digital Edition for iOS devices.

One of the technologies discussed in the story is Aira, a service that works with Google Glass and other video-streaming devices to give the visually impaired real-time assistance. For a few hundred dollars a month, a blind person can have a sighted person on call to help them navigate the world. The camera transmits a view of their surroundings, and agents respond with directions and advice.

This technology isn't cutting-edge; it's basically a Google Glass–enabled helpdesk. But it opens up new frontiers for its users. And it wouldn't have been possible until relatively recently.

Oddly enough, this was the second time in recent weeks that I've seen Google Glass changing someone's life. At SXSW, I interviewed Thad Starner, the Director of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Thad has been wearing a computer since the early 1990s and is currently a devoted Google Glass user.

As I interviewed Thad, he used Glass to read his notes and research answers in real time. He isn't disabled, but he was undoubtedly assisted by the technology he was wearing on his face—no human can have that kind of total recall. And as we age, we are all going to need some kind of memory augmentation to keep up.

Indeed, we could all use a little help with something, albeit some more than others. And thanks to technology, there has never been a better time to get that help.

Find out more about smart assistive technology, along with reviews, news, and how-tos, in the May issue of the PC Magazine Digital Edition, available now via Apple iTunes.

Recommended stories

More stories