Jhing-Fa Wang, a pioneer of orange technology, professor of Department of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), southern Taiwan, has demonstrated 2 innovative designs featured at Gross National Happiness (GNH) and humanity-centered social caring arousing great attention at a recent press conference.
“And he can remind the elders of their medication, date and birthday. He is smart enough to answer questions of the elders, such as the current time and local weather. Through voice systems, Ji-li can easily control the switch of home appliances and take directions from his master.”
The first design initiated by Prof. Wang is a home service-oriented robot, nicknamed Ji-li after the Chinese pronunciation of orange and green, operated by a human-robot interactive system for senior companionship based on a cloud computing network.
With the interfaces including speech and sound recognition, speaker identification, face identification, sound source estimation and text to speech, Ji-li is able to interact with seniors.
Ji-li can follow the instructions of the master to perform various funny actions. Wang operated the robot and said, "And he can remind the elders of their medication, date and birthday. He is smart enough to answer questions of the elders, such as the current time and local weather. Through voice systems, Ji-li can easily control the switch of home appliances and take directions from his master."
The other novel design is called smiling face and sound detection, customized software to detect the users' happy face, laughter and brain wave to show the degree of happiness and further set up feedback or reminders to help them boost up the happy mood.
The designs of orange technology are user-centered and can be tailored by the needs of the users when orange technology concerning health, happiness, and care in general, Wang emphasized.
Wang's research extends the green technology of caring for earth and ecology to orange technology of caring for human beings. The development of orange technology is hoping to not only allow human beings to live longer, but healthier and happier.
The development of technology has caused wealth disparity and interpersonal alienation. Thus the direction of technological research and development needs to be healthier in the future. With the arrival of aging society, countries all over the world are eagerly promoting home-based and community-based health care service with remote monitoring methods, in order to create the best living space for people, according to Wang.
Expanding research and clinical options for children with cancer