Nick is an Interaction and Experience designer. He creates web sites, intranet platforms, and web applications always with the customer's intuitive and effective use at the forefront of my planning. Currently, he works as a User Experience Designer for the American Academy of Family Physicians. At the AAFP, he works to champion the user experience on websites such as FamilyDoctor.org and AAFP.org.
posted on June 01, 2017
No Alexa Required
by: Nick Mosher
Requirements
Home automation devices all are the rage right now. Amazon, Apple, Google, Mycroft are all making hardware in the hopes that you will use their artificial intelligence to make your life easier. From “Okay Google, play some Muse” to “Alexa, tell me a joke” these devices are designed make your life easier by not having to walk to your computer or pull out your phone.
These home AI can do so much for us as personal assistants, like these custom tasks [link]. But there are more things I find myself wishing these wonderful future machines could do for me. I really wish I could offload some of the remembering and worrying that my poor brain gets bogged down with.
Personally, I’m a big fan of the GTD method [link] of productivity. One of the major tenets of this method is that we humans have all these nagging things to remember or consider or worry about all the time. And we are so much more productive once we get these to get things off our minds and into a system so we don’t have to think about them. So what I’ve found exciting is that there are technologies today that can help you get things off your mind. Ways that you can think about it once and then not have to dedicate additional mental processing cycles to it again.
Our preschooler recently learned how to unlock and open the front door. I’d sometimes stay awake, worried that she’d decide to go out and play in the middle of the night, so I set up a sensor and an automatic alert whenever the door is left ajar. Now the worry is off my mind!
We have a cat on heart medication. Sometimes when I went to give him his pill, I wondered if my wife had already dosed him. So I set up a button on his pills to track his medicine intake [link] and alert us if we are late with his medications.
We have a button to mute our phones and doorbell whenever our kid goes down for a nap. I even found out how to set my phone to automatically mute when I go to the movies, library, or work.
Each of these features are useful because they happen passively. I don’t have to have to think to tell an A.I. to remind me or make sure to say a certain key phrase at a certain time. If it is a certain time of night, the alarm is armed automatically.
AutomateYourLife.org is dedicated to people like you and me who want to make sure the garage door gets closed when we leave the house, the front door is locked, the stove is off, and the pets are fed. Each month we will be writing about various ways to make your life easier. Join us by subscribing to our newsletter, following our blog posts via rss, or following our facebook page. We offer all these choices because we know that everyone has their own preferred method of communication.
Now we want to hear from you: How have you made your life easier through technology?
Join the Discussion!
Discuss this project in the Automate Your Life forums.
