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Trekkie Communicators Now a Reality
SolFire writes "Forbes is carrying an article about Vocera Communications and their little internal communication system that they have working at their office that functions like the badge communicators from ST:TNG. The employees wear the system as a badge and touch it to start the connection. Then they speak the name of the person they want to talk to and the system connects them using VOIP for one-on-one communication." We mentioned these in 2002.
their only about 3in long by 1in wide.... they use them in the hospitals, especially the ER, around here... alot quicker then having to find a phone or PA system
~ If you must mount the gallows do so with a coin for the hangman, a jest for the crowd, and a smile upon your face. ~
We evaluated Vocera last year. Really nice tech, but it wasn't - buzzword warning - enterprise ready. While it may work in one building, the server-side of it isn't scalable (or wasn't - I haven't looked at them since). It didn't help their case that it was Windows-based (get a virus/worm, lose communications *:^).
The lanyard-attached phone was pretty nice (since I can easily lose my cell phone as well) and I believe you can get a headset if you need to keep the receiving end private. I can still see those annoying/loud conversations popping up much more with these units, tho.
The routing capabilities worked well and it would be great for our help desk and emergency incident response teams. Being able to say "Where's Bill?" and get a response was also pretty cool. It's only as accurate as the nearest associated access point, but it's still better then not knowing which side of the building some is on.
Once they get more enterprise features (integration, scalability, global functionality) we'll probably adopt it in key areas.
Mind the gap...
In this story from last month's issue, Fast Company talks about VOIP tech and specifically these communicators being used at a hospital.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Check out push to talk.
More interesting, has anyone ever had to wait for a turbolift?
As a matter of fact, yes. I recall Kirk & Spock in one episode waiting for one. Sorry, don't recall which ep, I'm not that much of a Trekkie.
(In, I think, "Wrath of Khan", there's also a scene where the occupants of the lift pause it to talk -- when it finally arrives at destination McCoy is there waiting muttering something about "who's holding up the damn elevator?". Dang, maybe I am that much of a Trekkie....)
-- Alastair
Actually, there are two examples of transporter malfunctions that I can think of.
During season one of the original series, Kirk gets beamed up and his "good" and "evil" sides become separate entities.
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the transporter's buffers lose their pattern and get shunted back to Star Fleet. When the Enterprise queries them to see if they were able to retrieve them, Star Fleet states "What arrived didn't live long. Fortunately."
The devices are very cool. You sign in with your voice (the system stores a voice print that authenticates you). It knows who else is logged in to the system and can locate them if you assign locations to the AP's (big brother calling). It also ties in to your pbx system so you can dial the phone,"call 222-222-1342". Has a series of voice commands-voice recognition. You can setup groups and do group calls. A hospital is using it for paging/communications system in house. Devices are small and can be clipped on or hung on your neck with a lanyard. Can be used by multiple people. If the battery runs low, you sign off, drop the old one back in the charger. Pick up a new one and sign in and off you go. You can set it to "not disturb" you. And it tells you who is calling first (screen those calls) before you answer. Much more intelligence built into the server, this device has great potential... Now to program them to order chinese food for me automatically....
I had the chance to use these and evaluate rolling them out on a large scale. They are excelent little devices. Most of the innovation here is in the software, the keys are in the voice recognition and badge tracking. For the most part the system was very well thought out.
I've read a couple of post saying (probably joking) that they want all sorts of features in the badges, bluetooth, linux, etc. No, No, they've got it all wrong and vocera got it right, the badges are as simple and cheap as can be, they only have 3 buttons, and a simple LCD display. So all the battery life can be spent on the WIFI.
There is a regular headphone/mic jack on the badges.
The units work very well, and the feature of auto-forwarding to cell phones is great.
The management software is all written in Java, and changes quite often, as this is all coming from small company and bugs are fixed and features added all the time.