Slashdot Mirror
A Humanitarian Engineering Problem
zrosener asks: "A have a friend who has ALS (Stephen Hawking's ailment), a particularly nasty disease in which her motor neurons deteriorate over time, slowly waylaying her. She is in pretty bad shape now, and her movement is restricted to moving her eyes, and very limited (1 inch in each direction) hand movement. She has very light bell that she uses to wake up her husband when she needs assistance, but as her strength wanes it is becoming less and less effective. She is afraid at night now that if something were to go wrong she would not be able to rouse her husband. My challenge to you is to design a noise-making-husband-alerting device cheaply and quickly assembled from strip mall parts (Radioshack, Walmart, etc.) that she could use with her extremely restricted movement. Buttons are out of the questions, as are anything that requires gripping. Analog answers are encouraged too! Please email all suggestions or post them."
Without buttons... hmm... that makes it difficult. You need some sort of actuator. And I suppose telepathy is out of the question? :)
This has buttons, but...a keyboard attached to a Linux box with some good speakers attached. Make a program that delivers a loud alarm when the buttons are mashed.
It could even be GPLed.
How good are you and her husband going to feel when this crappy $5 "solution" ends up failing and costing her her life? And perhaps makes her last minutes or even hours on this planet a living hell, suffocating, choking, etc. I vote no.
Thanks for pointing that little gem out, since that was absolutely critical to the story.
Fucking know-it-all.