.Dust

Another intrigu­ing argu­ment that needs some inno­v­a­tive ideas to solve, it is what is called the ME (Mobile Essen­tials) prob­lem. “Mobile essen­tials” refers to the objects most peo­ple con­sider essen­tial and carry most of the time whilst out and about, and the first time I read some­thing about was in a Jan Chipchase (and oth­ers) study.[Jan is a Nokia researcher that goes around the world to do his job, and this is his blog.]. The first task is to pin­point all of your ME, the sec­ond one is about how to col­lect them every morn­ing (hmmm? “every time” sounds bet­ter) and don’t leave them at home. Look, I’m not talk­ing about how to find the objects you lose, I’m talk­ing about keep­ing away from for­get them (so I arrive at my car and the mobile phone is still at home, or my glasses are not on my nose but still wait­ing for me in my bathroom…)

In my opin­ion such a study needs to be tai­lored to coun­tries, cities, and peo­ple from dif­fer­ent social classes. Male and female for exam­ple don’t give the same value to things they have got, or they con­trol. The study men­tioned above is detailed enough, but let’s try to enu­mer­ate the items you con­sider ME. That’s my list: my mobile phone, my wal­let, my glasses, and my home’s door keys. No strange things. Is that all? Liv­ing in the jun­gle, prob­a­bly my list would be quite dif­fer­ent (my club, or some­thing sim­i­lar, a rope or pieces of it [why?]), but even between friends you’ll find differences.

Ok, you’ve got your list, now it could be use­ful carry those items with you, so we need to link all of these objects, what­ever they are, in a vir­tual (why not a strong metal chain?) sequence where every ring is strong linked to the oth­ers and all of them are linked to you. The vir­tual string we nor­mally use is our brain, some­times it works and some­times it doesn’t, it depends on how many helps we give it for remem­ber every­thing. If your ME are always the same, it looks it’s an easy task to con­trol them, but this is not true. Think at the “post-​it” exam­ple (all of you have expe­ri­enced it…): if you place a post-​it on your dash­board with a “fas­ten your seat belts” on it, you see it for about a cou­ple of weeks, and than it dis­ap­pears, melted in your every­day vision of your dashboard.Any hints? I sup­pose each of you have got his own method for such a prob­lem, it could be sim­ple, no much brain wast­ing, and it needs to work even if it’s too late, it’s rain­ing, chil­dren are scream­ing and you’ve got a top level meet­ing that is wait­ing for you. (For sure, it’s really dread­ful when you arrive at your car, ship­ping an umbrella, a two years old puppy and your bag, with another four or five years old grabbed at your coat, and you find that the car’s key is not in your pocket…).

I’ve built a sequence of funny images, that flow like a movie in my mind when it’s time to leave and I need to col­lect and ver­ify my stuff: the phone put the glasses on, opens its mouth and eats keys, pay­ing the bill using my wallet…Sometimes I change it, (some of them could not be writ­ten here), I can change the actors so it could be used for dif­fer­ent MEs, but the ques­tion remains: no smart ways to solve this prob­lems? An RFID gate­way can sub­sti­tute my door and it checks that all of my tagged objects are in my pocket, but we need a gate­way, a smart archi­tect, a mild wife and some UHF tags, for long dis­tance read­ing. Not so easy, UHF antenna need about 2W power for a good 2 meters read­ing, it looks not so safe go back and forth under this field. RFID prob­a­bly remains one of the smartest solu­tions, even if I’m look­ing for some­thing eas­ier like mum’s advices “hey, don’t lose your head!” that stops me on the doorway.

Why do I blog this?

New tech­nolo­gies to solve every­day prob­lems, and the ME is only one of them…Let’s go deep in RFID field and prox­im­i­ties with the next posts!

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