Tencent Cloud slaps googly eyes on a monitor, says it can care for oldies Tencent Cloud has released an odd robot-adjacent device designed to provide telemedicine services. The effort is called i-Care and is the result of a tie up with USA-based IT services Millennium Technology Services (MTS)'s subsidiary Invincible Technology. The two companies set out to create "a digital solution that aims to …
An AI algo, some DL/ML data mining of a massive database of PII including healthcare info on millions of people, a DeepFake chatbot, & someone "accidentally" leaving an access node in/unsecured so someone can waltz right in, download a copy of said data, & inject their own video clips, chatbot scripts, & other "amusing" replies to patient questions.
P: Hey Doc, what's this wierd growth on my toe?
AI DeepFake injected reply: It's terminal. Please leave all your money to Our Glorious Leader and then kill yourself in a humane fashion.
P: WHAT? It looks like a bunion!
AI: It's terminal. Adjust your will & throw yourself under a bus immediately.
P: Are you sure?
AI: Terminal. Will. Bus. Now.
(The patient wanders away sobbing in destraught dejection.)
AI: Just kidding. It's a bunion. Hello? Hello? Must have lost the connection. Ok, next patient!
=-/
Nurses, plural ?
What kind of fantasy world do you live in. There will be one nurse per hospital (requirement was one nurse per ward but we got a management consultant to classify the entire hospital as a single ward) but this will reduce auxiliary care provider assistants by 20% - unless it turns out that this machine is more expensive than an auxiliary care assistant unit
Provided they fall near enough and can reach up to the screen from where they landed (and find the button under those circumstances).
It's amazing to me how little thought about actual use cases goes into so many of these devices.
Even if its a separate device it's useless unless it included an accelerometer to detect falls. If it does they are going to have to have a way of dealing with confused people who have just dropped the device.Any system which doesn't deal with a non-responsive, fallen patient is worthless.
Not useless, it can/is used to alert help in the event of a fall. Yes it's no help if a patient is unconscious, but many elderly people die as a result of falling in their home and being unable to get up. So it may not prevent all fall related deaths, but it's saves a significant proportion. Why anyone would see that as a negative is bizarre. Its the equivalent of saying cars shouldn't have airbags cos some people still die in crashes.
It's amazing to me how little thought about actual use cases goes into so many of these devices.
Like 'Dementia Clocks' which invariably have small buttons tucked round the back so there's no easy way for a victim to terminate the "take your medicine" announcements. They aren't cheap, are quite expensive when including the additional functionality which is of no practical use.
"Just why designers went for floating eyes rather than something more human is not explained. Nor is how a baby boomer might react to having their autumn years overseen by a cartoon figure."
Can't help you with the first. As for the second, the reaction would include disassembly and removal--careful if the object was not insolent, possibly involving a baseball bat otherwise.
That would be terrifying to most of us already.
Now imagine someone with dementia, they are already confused about time and place every time they wake up, and now they also have these piercing floating eyes looking at them.
"You seem distressed! How can I help?" It says.
"Please don't that is critic...." It says, before promptly being smashed, possibly followed by a very bad time for the nurses on shift.
What makes it even more incredible to me, is the massive amount of research that's already been done in this field. Just a quick search for research papers and you'll get thousands of credible sources that tested what does, and what does not work. I'm pretty sure that the general tendency is: the more cuddly, cute, and familiar, the better it works. This is neither cuddly, cute nor familiar for the elderly.
To me this product looks like it's never even been looked at by a HCI expert, never been properly tested with actual patients, or even medical workers, and just went straight from POC to press release.
Come on Tencent, you've got the cash, just put in that little bit of extra effort, and you can do amazing things.
Saj is perfectly happy to have more GP's as long as they are wage slaves for an American health Care company not owners of their own group practice, that's far too socialist for him.
I'm currently a patient at a wonderful group practice covering a number of villages from 3 surgeries. As so many of the partners are at retirement age I'm dreading them selling it.
I had the dubious honour of managing the program - it was actually called Custom Factory Integration, and the Customer Care function would have been known as CFI Care. Thankfully I helped to shut it down fairly rapidly, as the business case was terrible ;)
Oh blimey, remnants of it still exist on the web....
http://euro.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/services/deployment/cficlientcfiservices?c=eu&l=en
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
