CCC @ AAAS 2017- The Technology of the Future

Contributions to this post were provided by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council members Maja Matarić and Shwetak Patel.  

Recently, we have been highlighting CCC’s role at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advance of Science (AAAS) and have posted blogs about Health in Your Pocket: Diagnosing and Treating Disease with Smartphones and What Happens When Everyday Objects Become Internet Devices: A Science Policy Agenda.

The focus of this post is on the Technology of the Future flash talks that CCC Council members Maja Matarić and Shwetak Patel presented.

In Matarić’s Socially Assistive Robotics: Creating Robots That (Provide) Care talk, she described work in the new field of socially assistive robotics, which focuses on creating robots capable of providing personalized therapy and care through social, as opposed to physical, interaction. She talked about the implications of augmentation vs. automation on the future of work, and discussed the research challenges of developing human-centered technologies for stroke patients, Alzheimer’s patients, healthy elderly, and children with autism spectrum disorders. You can read her full abstract here and her recently published Science Robotics article on Socially assistive robotics: Human augmentation versus automation.

In Patel’s The Emerging Role of Mobile Phones in Health talk, he discussed how mobile phones and computing plays a critical role in personal health monitoring. He described a set of projects where it is already possible to conduct clinically relevant health diagnostics using just the sensors already present on a smartphone. These tools can be used for population level screening, managing chronic diseases, and as case finding tools in developing regions. You can read his full abstract here and see his slides here.