NETRA
MIT Media Lab researchers have created a quick, simple, and inexpensive way to use mobile phones to measure refractive errors of the eye, including nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, and age-related vision loss. Until now, these measurements have only been possible using specialized equipment operated by a trained professional.
This new system, called NETRA (Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment), is a project of the Media Lab's Camera Culture research group. A small plastic device—which currently can be produced for less than US$2—is easily clipped onto a mobile phone screen. To use it, simply hold the device up to the eye, look into it, and use the phone’s keypad until two patterns overlap. This is repeated several times per eye, with the patterns at different angles. The whole process takes about two minutes, during which time software loaded onto the phone computes and provides the data needed to create a prescription.
The small size and low cost of the device make it especially well-suited for use in the developing world. As many as two billion people worldwide have refractive errors of the eye, and according to the World Health Organization, these errors, left uncorrected, are the world's second-highest cause of blindness.
Want to learn more? View the IDG News Service video, or read all about it in the MIT News, Fast Company, New Scientist, BusinessWeek, India Today, Fox Boston, and The Boston Herald.
Merry Miser
Merry Miser is a mobile application that helps its users make better decisions about spending. The application uses the context provided by a user's location and financial history to provide personalized interventions when the user is near an opportunity to spend. The interventions, which are motivated by prior research in positive psychology, persuasive technology, and shopping psychology, consist of informational displays about context-relevant spending history, subjective assessments of past purchases, personal budgets, and savings goals.
Bokode: The Better Barcode
The ubiquitous barcodes found on product packaging provide information to the scanner at the checkout counter, but that's about all they do. Now, researchers at the Media Lab have come up with a new kind of very tiny barcode that could provide a variety of useful information to shoppers as they scan the shelves—and could even lead to new devices for classroom presentations, business meetings, videogames or motion-capture systems.
The tiny labels are just 3 millimeters across—about the size of the @ symbol on a typical computer keyboard. Yet they can contain far more information than an ordinary barcode: thousands of bits. Currently they require a lens and a built-in LED light source, but future versions could be made reflective, similar to the holographic images now frequently found on credit cards, which would be much cheaper and more unobtrusive.
One of the advantages of the new labels is that unlike today's barcodes, they can be "read" from a distance—up to a few meters away. In addition, unlike the laser scanners required to read today's labels, these can be read using any standard digital camera, such as those now built in to about a billion cellphones around the world.
Read the full article: "Barcodes for the rest of us"
MIT News | July 24, 2009
