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Samsung’s ‘Look at Me’ App to Help Children with Autism Shows Serious Potential in Test Trial

Samsung’s new app is attempting to help children with autism improve their ability to make eye contact and enhance their overall social skills through a series of daily games and tests.

While many new apps have focused on getting users addicted to new versions of Tetris or making it easier to take selfies, Samsung has been paving the way for apps to become useful tools in the medical world.

The Seoul National University Bundang Hospital and Yonsie University’s department of psychology developed Samsung’s Look at Me app, which has already proven to be effective in its first trial run.

Through a series of cleverly devised games and challenges, children with autism can practice making certain facial expressions as well as decoding the expressions of others.

The app recommends a daily usage of at least 15 to 20 minutes.

While Samsung insisted that the effectiveness of the app is not conclusive just yet, parents in the first trial run have found the app to be extremely helpful.

More than half of the 20 children who used the app over the span of eight weeks showed substantial improvement in communicating with others and making more eye contact.

In a promotional video for the app, a mother opens up about the joys of being able to look into her son’s eyes after she had been struggling for years to get him to make consistent eye contact.

She explains that in the past she felt like there was a wall between her and her autistic son. But after spending time with the app, she said she has managed to develop a special bond with her son that she believes may not have been possible without Look at Me.

One organization, Autism Speaks Canada, believes the app shows serious promise and is working with Samsung to get tablets with Look at Me already preloaded on them into the hands of at least 200 more families with autistic children.

The app is also available for free on the Google Play store and has earned an impressive four-star rating out of a possible five stars.

If the app continues to be successful for other families, it could pave the way for more app developers to build on this technology and create more ways to help children with autism enhance their social skills.

 

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10 Cool and Futuristic Sci-Fi Technologies Invading Our Reality

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Doctor in the Car

Researchers at the University of Michigan International Center for Automotive Medicine have created the technology to determine likely injuries in an accident before help arrives. Predictive models were made by cross-referencing crash data from sensors on cars. The speed and location of impact, along with 3-D scans of accident victims, will be available for doctors.

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Exercise Underpants

The Finnish company Myontec has begun marketing underpants embedded with electromyographic sensors that tell you how hard you’re working your quadriceps, hamstrings and gluteal muscles when working out. This technology could help with weight loss and diets.

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Handy Guide to Apple’s CarPlay In-Dash Experience

Apple continues to be the forerunner of technological innovation. For those of you dreaming of having your own on-board computer in your car, Apple’s CarPlay is the closest thing to turning your car into a starship from Star Trek.

“CarPlay features Siri voice control and is specially designed for driving scenarios. It also works with your car’s controls — knobs, buttons or touchscreen. And the apps you want to use in the car have been reimagined, so you can use them while your eyes and hands stay where they belong,” according to Apple. 

This system is available in only one make and model — the very expensive Ferrari FF. This is the first and only commercially available vehicle in the world with Apple CarPlay right now. 

Earlier this year, Mercedes and Volvo were ready to deliver the same iPhone-compatible experience, but they were delayed into 2015.

Next year, the Volvo XC90 SUV and Mercedes-Benz C-Class will join Honda, Hyundai and Jaguar as models that will feature CarPlay.

More car manufacturers like BMW, Chevrolet, Ford, KIA, Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Opel, Peugeot-Citroen, Subaru, Suzuki and Toyota will work on adding CarPlay.

Features

CarPlay allows you to use all your iPhone’s capabilities and features without touching it. Your music, navigation to your favorite stores, taking phone calls, reading and texting messages can be controlled without holding your phone.

You can even play your iTunes music, navigate Apple Maps and watch videos from your dash. In the future, Apple plans to allow third parties to build CarPlay compatibility into their own apps, making them available through the CarPlay system.

Ways to Use

One option you can use is the  touchscreen display.

In the next year, some CarPlay cars will come with touchscreen displays made into the dashboard. Users can use this display to open and close apps using a very simple home screen. This is the most straightforward method of using CarPlay.

Another option you can use is iPhone’s Siri.

By using Siri, you can talk to your vehicle and tell it what to do. That does not mean autopilot. That includes selecting music from your library or requesting a playlist. You can also have your messages read out to you before you reply.

The third option is using your physical buttons, knobs and controls. The volume controls, track skip and other features are all integrated and will work.

As 2015 approaches, keep an eye out for this new feature from Apple.

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Internet Privacy May Be Hard to Find in 2025, Many Experts Say

With increased government surveillance, the iCloud and the Sony hacking scandals and hacktivist groups on the rise, Internet security and privacy may be a thing of the past.

According to a Pew Research Center report released Dec. 18, 2,511 experts are on opposite sides of the issue on whether privacy is a feasible thing to achieve by the year 2025.

“This report is a look into the future of privacy in light of the technological changes, ever-growing monetization of digital encounters and shifting relationship of citizens and their governments that is likely to extend through the next decade,” according to researchers and writers Lee Raine and Janna Anderson of Pewinternet.org.

The report looked at a range of criteria and asked questions involving the issue.

Pew asked experts to think about “if policy makers and technology innovators could create a secure, popularly accepted, and trusted privacy-rights infrastructure by 2025 that allows for business innovation and monetization…”

The political issues around privacy on the Internet may create unwanted gridlock for an issue that needs fixing immediately.

“I do not think 10 years is long enough for policy makers to change the way they make policy to keep up with the rate of technological progress. We have never had ubiquitous surveillance before, much less a form of ubiquitous surveillance that emerges primarily from voluntary (if market-obscured) choices. Predicting how it shakes out is just fantasy,” wrote John Wilbanks, chief commons officer for Sage Bionetworks. 

Out of the experts polled, 55 percent believed that privacy was unable to be a reality in today’s technological landscape. The remaining 45 percent seem to be more optimistic about it. All of the experts believed that the Internet is inherently public entity. 

This issue will continue to be debated for the next decade and beyond as long as the Internet remains a vital part of modern life.

 

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LG Unveils Sleek Text-Message-Controlled Speakers That Eliminate Wireless Connectivity Hassles

LG Electronics is ready to revolutionize our music experience with speakers that can be controlled through text messages.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015 in January, the tech giant plans to showcase the Music Flow speaker system.

The line of new speakers will be able to accept text message commands through a service called Line.

These days most popular tech gadgets can be controlled by using our smart phones as remotes, but LG wants to take the smart phone capabilities a step further.

In addition to using a text message to pause, play and skip songs, the texting commands will also be able to tell the speakers what kind of music you’re in the mood for.

A message that reads something along the lines of “play music for party” will have the system switch over to your party playlist.

If you won’t be in the mood to jam for too long you can also text the speaker and tell it to “turn off music after one hour.”

LG also hopes to do away with the pesky connecting process that people currently deal with through Bluetooth technologies.

Going through the trouble of pairing devices and searching for the right one only to somehow end up connected to your neighbor’s printer is a funny but slightly irritating story that most people have heard once or twice—or at least some variation of it.

LG’s new speakers, however, will be able to detect when a smartphone or tablet gets about a foot away and will automatically connect to it and play any music that is playing on the phone.

“So you could be listening to music on your headphones on the subway ride home but the music will begin playing automatically from your living room Wi-Fi Sound Bar when you enter your living room,” LG said in a press release.

Of course, the usual means of connectivity will still be available such as Bluetooth and a home Wi-Fi network integration.

The Music Flow line is also stylishly designed to fit the taste of the average modern consumer who appreciates chic simplicity and clean lines.

The complete line of the new speakers includes “the company’s first battery-powered Wi-Fi Speaker (Model H4 Portable), advanced Wi-Fi Sound Bars (Models HS7 and HS9) and the Streaming 3D Blu-ray Player (Model BP550),” according to the press release, and all items are designed to be compatible with Android and iOS devices.

 

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9 Robots That Could Take Your Job In 2015

In our modern world we will be interacting with robots that at some point in time had a person doing its job. Robots might make the consumer happier but robots are taking away human jobs at a record pace, according to Deloitte . Even though the report is about jobs in the United Kingdom, it is still a global phenomenon. If this continues—and it will—the unemployment rate will also increase as the world’s population increases as well.

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Sales Clerks

Most stores like Walmart and Kroger have begun to push self-help checkouts. The self-checkouts have made the consumer more independent but has taken away jobs for needy people. At this point, those machines need a human to work out the occasional bugs and help customers who have issues, but in the near future people will not need to oversee them anymore.

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Hotel Concierge

Just like the self-checkout, these machine concierges will take away human concierges.

 

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NASA’s Plans For A Cloud City Above Venus Could Have People Living Like the Jetsons

Nasa Plans for Cloud City

After years of exploration efforts focused on getting human life on Mars, NASA is ready to bring Venus back into the conversation with a permanent city floating high above Earth’s closest neighbor.

NASA has unveiled the concept for the floating city, deemed Cloud City, that would allow humans to live above Venus since it is impossible for them to live on the planet’s surface.

The average person discussing the possibilities of life on another planet tend to set their sights on Mars, despite the fact that it’s actually not the closest planet to Earth.

Venus is closer to Earth but the surface conditions on the planet make it inhabitable for human life.

Venus has an atmospheric pressure more than 90 times greater than that of Earth and temperatures that soar to more than 860 degrees Fahrenheit.

It also has a atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide, a very small amount of nitrogen and a cloud layer composed of sulphuric acid.

All these things mean humans can’t live on the planet’s surface—but NASA believes people could live comfortably floating above the planet instead.

Cloud City would be floating about 30 miles above the planet and people would be living on a High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) spacecraft.

Functional plans for a permanent Cloud City are still in the works but for now humans would be able to live above Venus for about 30 days before returning to Earth.

The idea, for now, also open to the average person looking for a literal out-of-this-world vacation destination.

Astronauts would be the only ones welcome in Cloud City for the purpose of collecting data about the planet.

The temperatures and pressure on-board the HAVOC spacecraft would allow astronauts to stay above the planet while being subjected to conditions similar to what they would face on Earth.

The atmosphere at that altitude will also offer protections from solar radiation comparable to living in Canada.

After the initial round of probing for 30 days, NASA hopes to send teams of astronauts up to Cloud City to live for at least an entire year.

NASA has already made plans for transportation in Cloud City as well with a design that will essentially have people living like the famous cartoon family of the future – The Jetsons.

The design would allow astronauts to leave the main HAVOC spacecraft and further explore in Venus’s atmosphere.

Cloud City itself would be a fixed city but solar-powered Zeppelins would be used for further exploration.

NASA tells IEEE Spectrum that it could be another decade or two before Cloud City actually comes to fruition but experts believe further exploration of Venus could help advance efforts to get life on Mars.

“Venus has value as a destination in and of itself for exploration and colonization, but it’s also complementary to current Mars plans,” said Chris Jones of the Langley Research Center, according to CNET. “If you did Venus first, you could get a leg up on advancing those technologies and those capabilities ahead of doing a human-scale Mars mission. It’s a chance to do a practice run, if you will, of going to Mars.”