Having volunteered weekily in nursing homes across central Japan for several years, as well as having additional social work experience with multi-generational Japanese families, I can really relate to what Bushcat is saying here.
Technologically, exoskeletons I think are cool. However, this particular need has been greatly increased if not caused by cultural negligence. If you get out of Tokyo, and head up into the Yamanaka sato (rural mountains), you will find yourself surrounded by legions of shriveled up and crippled elderly. This is primarily dietary and vitamin deficiency based. Imagine trying to walk while curled in the fetal position, then realize they can never lift themselves higher than that. Yet they have the most beautiful smiles always.
Outside N.America and Europe, there is little history of collective social organizations or public welfare. This has been nearly exclusively left to the families to manage. Theoretically, it works as long as the family is able to meet the medical and financial demands.
However, with post WW2 globalization trends, more de-emphasis has been placed on the family, with official government promotion of the 'unfettered' life, and putting mom and dad in 'the happy place'. These places for the most part are run like government factories where people line up waiting to 'graduate'.
While this technology development is cool in its own right, it won't resolve bone density issues, musclear degeneration, or the other environmental and dietary ailments. This type of 'solution' is endemic to Japanese beaureaucracy, in that it is much more agreeable to patch things than fix the system. Everyone knows it sucks, everyone knows its wrong, but don't rock the boat and we'll pretend that the problem will go away. By the grace of the great cabocha (pumpkin) more people have not died as a result of the nuke 'whoopsies' there from this kind of management.
Shouts out to 'genki na kamesan', an incredible onoe-of-a-kind retirement home in Sakado. That place was a fun, lively, 'LIVING' place.
Amen! This problem is much more widespread than is widely recognized.
I occasionally consult for an aquaintance who is a senior factory automation engineer at a fortune 50 manufacturing plant. Most of their factory controls systems are specialized industial automation devices, like Allen-Bradley PLC's. These devices control the actual operation of production equipment via electrical switching. They are cludgey little robotic boxes, that are 'safe' because they only do exactly what you tell them to do.
The problem lies with the command and monitoring computers. Most of the automation systems are based on DecVAX's that control their PLC minions. Management not being systems-savvy, wants something 'prettier' that does not require legacy employees to maintain. Monitoring systems read data from the PLCs and the VAXs and display status screens to the operators. This data output is mission-critical, and the company can be held criminally and financially liable by federal and state regulators at an hourly rate for lack of data regarding environmental waste management and manufacturing processes. Lack of data for even a couple of minutes can lose federal certification to manufacture and distribute the products.
MOST of the mission critical monitoring systems now run either NT4 or windows 2000. A custom vendor app reads monitor data from across a TCPIP network, and displays it in a client app. This app & data can also be exposed to VB and VC apps. I have been told that the factory network and the office network are separete. I doubt this to be fully the case. Now the manager wants a webified executive report of monitoring data anytime-anywhere after the last expensive 'whoops' where she had to tell the EPA she had no idea what was going on under the roof of her factory.
Here's the scoop: no money, no dev kit, engineer can 'do' VB and access. We're stealthing in an Apache/mySQL system, where 'borrowing' hooks from a spare monitoring system in a VB app we'll dump data as available into records in mySQL, and package 'em purty in Apache/PHP. System requirements are that:
1) data from factory network be available on corporate network.
2) data be 'purty'
3) no budget, no funds
4) be robust enough to cover boss'es tail when the EPA (and worse) shows up
You read though and see how many laws of data security and reliabilty we are bastardizing here. And why do we do it? Because it is the only option to keep making sgreen sunglasses in the Emerald City. Oh, and maintanence dudes have laptops with this monitoring software as roamers too. I believe they (the laptops) go home all the time too. As for the caliber of the aformentioned maintanence guys - 2 weeks ago one pushed the wrong button trying to prove he knew what he was doing, and dumped a dozen employees worth of parts in the wrong tank. Bye-bye parts.
Meanwhile, as this company is Microsoft's largest beta site (and possibly their largest client outside of the Federal Government), the future bodes evil that we may see a significant test deployment of WinCE automation controllers.
SAFETY-wise, most of these systems are NOT run on M$. NTx lacks the serious capacity to handle mission-critical realtime data - see the readmes and EULA about 'do not use for life support or nukes', despite what they say. Problem is, folks thought too shallow and only applied that to controls, and not also to monitors. The monitors however, are almost completely M$ turf now. So if you have data that says your autoclave is only at 10% pressure when its at 90%, or if you have no idea how long parts were in tank A, or what goo is in tank A, crane sez it is in position 3, but is actually in position 5 - so you speed it up and take off fred's head with a production part, gee, with people dieing on the job, you feel real safe as a consumer, now don't you? You could say that the control system will take care of its self, that the train engineer will hit the brakes - except he just got laid off because the windows box knows where everyone is so the controller can do the engineer's job.
ps - WinCE/Mobile running every car by 2010, pretty cool idea, rriigghhtt?
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Having volunteered weekily in nursing homes across central Japan for several years, as well as having additional social work experience with multi-generational Japanese families, I can really relate to what Bushcat is saying here.
Technologically, exoskeletons I think are cool. However, this particular need has been greatly increased if not caused by cultural negligence. If you get out of Tokyo, and head up into the Yamanaka sato (rural mountains), you will find yourself surrounded by legions of shriveled up and crippled elderly. This is primarily dietary and vitamin deficiency based. Imagine trying to walk while curled in the fetal position, then realize they can never lift themselves higher than that. Yet they have the most beautiful smiles always.
Outside N.America and Europe, there is little history of collective social organizations or public welfare. This has been nearly exclusively left to the families to manage. Theoretically, it works as long as the family is able to meet the medical and financial demands.
However, with post WW2 globalization trends, more de-emphasis has been placed on the family, with official government promotion of the 'unfettered' life, and putting mom and dad in 'the happy place'. These places for the most part are run like government factories where people line up waiting to 'graduate'.
While this technology development is cool in its own right, it won't resolve bone density issues, musclear degeneration, or the other environmental and dietary ailments. This type of 'solution' is endemic to Japanese beaureaucracy, in that it is much more agreeable to patch things than fix the system. Everyone knows it sucks, everyone knows its wrong, but don't rock the boat and we'll pretend that the problem will go away. By the grace of the great cabocha (pumpkin) more people have not died as a result of the nuke 'whoopsies' there from this kind of management.
Shouts out to 'genki na kamesan', an incredible onoe-of-a-kind retirement home in Sakado. That place was a fun, lively, 'LIVING' place.
Amen! This problem is much more widespread than is widely recognized.
I occasionally consult for an aquaintance who is a senior factory automation engineer at a fortune 50 manufacturing plant. Most of their factory controls systems are specialized industial automation devices, like Allen-Bradley PLC's. These devices control the actual operation of production equipment via electrical switching. They are cludgey little robotic boxes, that are 'safe' because they only do exactly what you tell them to do.
The problem lies with the command and monitoring computers. Most of the automation systems are based on DecVAX's that control their PLC minions. Management not being systems-savvy, wants something 'prettier' that does not require legacy employees to maintain. Monitoring systems read data from the PLCs and the VAXs and display status screens to the operators. This data output is mission-critical, and the company can be held criminally and financially liable by federal and state regulators at an hourly rate for lack of data regarding environmental waste management and manufacturing processes. Lack of data for even a couple of minutes can lose federal certification to manufacture and distribute the products.
MOST of the mission critical monitoring systems now run either NT4 or windows 2000. A custom vendor app reads monitor data from across a TCPIP network, and displays it in a client app. This app & data can also be exposed to VB and VC apps. I have been told that the factory network and the office network are separete. I doubt this to be fully the case. Now the manager wants a webified executive report of monitoring data anytime-anywhere after the last expensive 'whoops' where she had to tell the EPA she had no idea what was going on under the roof of her factory.
Here's the scoop: no money, no dev kit, engineer can 'do' VB and access. We're stealthing in an Apache/mySQL system, where 'borrowing' hooks from a spare monitoring system in a VB app we'll dump data as available into records in mySQL, and package 'em purty in Apache/PHP. System requirements are that:
1) data from factory network be available on corporate network.
2) data be 'purty'
3) no budget, no funds
4) be robust enough to cover boss'es tail when the EPA (and worse) shows up
You read though and see how many laws of data security and reliabilty we are bastardizing here. And why do we do it? Because it is the only option to keep making sgreen sunglasses in the Emerald City. Oh, and maintanence dudes have laptops with this monitoring software as roamers too. I believe they (the laptops) go home all the time too. As for the caliber of the aformentioned maintanence guys - 2 weeks ago one pushed the wrong button trying to prove he knew what he was doing, and dumped a dozen employees worth of parts in the wrong tank. Bye-bye parts.
Meanwhile, as this company is Microsoft's largest beta site (and possibly their largest client outside of the Federal Government), the future bodes evil that we may see a significant test deployment of WinCE automation controllers.
SAFETY-wise, most of these systems are NOT run on M$. NTx lacks the serious capacity to handle mission-critical realtime data - see the readmes and EULA about 'do not use for life support or nukes', despite what they say. Problem is, folks thought too shallow and only applied that to controls, and not also to monitors. The monitors however, are almost completely M$ turf now. So if you have data that says your autoclave is only at 10% pressure when its at 90%, or if you have no idea how long parts were in tank A, or what goo is in tank A, crane sez it is in position 3, but is actually in position 5 - so you speed it up and take off fred's head with a production part, gee, with people dieing on the job, you feel real safe as a consumer, now don't you? You could say that the control system will take care of its self, that the train engineer will hit the brakes - except he just got laid off because the windows box knows where everyone is so the controller can do the engineer's job.
ps - WinCE/Mobile running every car by 2010, pretty cool idea, rriigghhtt?