From the Home to the Store: Profile & Critique
Consider a home that knows where you are at all times. And that can send and receive messages between family members, simplify the time-consuming process of downloading and preparing home videos and photo albums, and inform you how much energy you’re using, potentially saving you money on your electricity bill. What if it could tell you what the weather is like outside, call an ambulance if you get hurt, remind you if you forget to take your medicine, or help you find that darn remote? Introducing the Aware Home
Profile: Aware Home
As humans, we spend most of our time at home with our family or by ourselves. We spend our time at home performing everyday activities like sleeping, eating, relaxing, cooking, and so on. Because of the trend to broaden computing away from screens and more into our everyday appliances, the Aware Home Research Initiative (AWRI) research is meant to explore computing in the home.
The AWRI began in 1999 by members of Georgia Institute of Technology’s Future computing Environments Group (FCE) and is an interdisciplinary research endeavor aimed at addressing the fundamental technical, design, and social challenges for people in a home setting. Researchers were set out to explore how computation and embedded technologies could support everyday activities in a home.
The 3-story, 5040 square foot facility was completed in 2000 and exemplifies one of the largest dedicated spaces to explore the visions of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp), human-computer interaction, machine learning & augmented reality, wireless networking, and software engineering and sensor technology. The home was designed with two identical floors, each having a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a laundry room. The home was originally intended to allow full-time resident(s) and research participants on one floor and prototyping of new technologies, sensing, and other research on the other floor. One of the research’s strongest fields is home health and wellness, with major efforts focusing on technologies to help aging-in-place and parents with children with developmental disorders.
Technologies Used
The technologies used in the Aware Home to support the research included cameras and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to identify and map an occupant’s location and various types of sensors. The house, for example, has a smart floor with a network of pressure sensors that could detect a person’s manner of walking as they move between rooms, offering an additional means of occupant identification. To find frequently lost objects, one of the applications used for tracking and sensing technologies was radio-frequency tags. The tags are attached to each object for the residents to track if ever misplaced.
The floor plan of the first floor of the Aware Home, indicating the location of visual tracking, RFID floor mats, and fingerprint detectors that provide location information feeding the location service.
Aging in Place
As people get older, it can get more difficult to live on their own. Aging parents no longer live near their adult children, making their family members concerned about their whereabouts. The Aware Home allows aging residents to remain in their homes longer through remote sensing. Family members can monitor their elderly relatives by requesting support if they notice something is off. With the sensing technology around the house, family members will have a sense of security and attentiveness.
Because of the success of the Aware Home Research, further research like the Ambient Alert project was built upon it. The Ambient Alert project is a study to design a notification system that can be easily used by older adults to notify them when the stove is on or to control the water heater.
We read from the Aware Home Research that ubiquitous computing can be embedded into our everyday technology to make our environment a more efficient and easier one. As decades have passed from the 1999 study, we’ve come to understand how technology and people co-evolve.
What if you were able to pick up a bag of chips, a soda pop, and a handful of candy and just walk out of a store with a ping from your phone notifying you of your receipt? No one to talk to. Just grab and go. Well, that’s exactly what Amazon has created with their Amazon Go and Amazon Go Grocery Stores.
Critique: Amazon Grab & Go
Amazon Go is a convenience store that first opened to the public in 2018 in Seattle, Washington. The convenience store sells products like prepared foods, meal kits, limited groceries, and liquor. What made Amazon Go the buzz around the block was its cashier-less concept. Nobody to check out your items. No more waiting for the self-checkout registers. Just simply pick up all the items your need and simply walk out of the door. Skip the checkout and receive a receipt of your purchases through the Amazon Go app after leaving the store. As of 2020, there are 29 open and announced Amazon Go store locations in Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and New York City.
To add on top of the convenience stores, Amazon introduced Amazon Go Grocery in 2020. Continuing to use its “Just Walk Out” technology, Amazon’s groceries allow customers to shop for everyday grocery items like fresh produce, meat, seafood, bakery items, household essentials, and so forth. Same as the convenience stores, when customers exit the store, their cart is checked out automatically using their payment card on file. But how does it all work?
Technologies Used
Before entering an Amazon Go store or Amazon Go Grocery store, you’ll need to download the Amazon Go app and link it to your Amazon account. When you walk inside, you’ll need to scan your phone with the 2D barcode in the Amazon Go app on the turnstile to identify you. Then you can begin shopping — picking up items, putting them in a basket or bags. You don’t need to check out and you can replace items any time.
Amazon is using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), multiple sensors, cameras, RFID readers, and computer vision to monitor shoppers and their items. The “Just Walk Out” technology is a camera-tracking system that also uses some kind of AI to track you through the store. If you ever look above the ceiling of any Amazon store, you’ll see over 200 cameras and sensors pointing in different directions. They’ll not only keep an eye on things but also feed information about customers moving around the store to servers that use machine learning to determine exactly what they put into their bag. In addition to the cameras and sensors above, there are also sensors on the shelves where the system is aware of every item’s exact weight.
Similar to the Aware Home research of using RFID to identify lost objects or a resident’s locations, Amazon uses RFID to detect when shoppers take items from the shelves and put them back
Amazon offers its customers a better experience, requiring them to take full advantage of the new technological environment.
Sparking New Trends
From the Aware Home to Amazon Go, ubicomp technology continues to alter our day-to-day activities whether in the home or a store. We see here from Amazon’s technology that Amazon Go is setting a precedent for the future of retail. The technologies used in both settings investigate the ways to control and adapt the technologies to fulfill a user’s daily needs.
