Privacy and caring

Daughter is becoming more and more protective of her privacy. She'd have enjoyed learning from the British Computer Society (BCS) Xmas lecture yesterday at Oxford, where Kieron O'Hara spoke on "The Spy in the Coffee Machine". Yes - a machine that notes how often you use it and lets someone know. It's been developed in Japan, where older people drink a lot of miso soup and green tea during the day. If they don't use the machine, then perhaps they're not eating and drinking, and there's something wrong, so the person who receives the information from the machine can go and check on their parent or aged relative.

So it's not really a coffee machine, but same idea. And I guess if no one reads or cares about the information, the aged person will be just as uncared for anyhow. I'm feeling peeved that BT isn't caring for my aged relatives - it won't connect them back to their phone line that AOL have disconnected them from, and that was at the beginning of November. So I can't phone them, or email them and they can't read this. All they've got are mobile phones - and with older eyesight and wobbly fingers, mobile phones are not very accessible devices.

I've put O'Hara's book on my wish list, but perhaps I should get it for my daughter.