為了提升警員辦案效率，紐約市警局( NYPD )可望採購谷哥（Google Project Glass ）眼鏡作為辦案工具。
一名紐約市警局高階警官向科技網站VentureBeat透露，已經取得數副谷歌眼鏡，也正在測試能否協助警方執行勤務，特別是能否協助巡邏員警盤查嫌犯時，迅速比對資料庫的罪犯資料，或是在問話時讀取嫌犯犯罪紀錄。
不過，谷歌則發布新聞稿否認將與紐約市警局合作，但表示紐約市警局應該是透過「谷歌眼鏡探索者計畫」（ Google Glass Explorer Program）購入谷歌眼鏡。谷哥表示，任何年滿18歲的美國居民，只要提出申請，並獲得谷歌同意後，就能以每副1500美元價格購入谷歌眼鏡。
對於科技網站報導，紐約市警方不願回應。
Startups see healthy future for Google Glass in medicine ( 谷哥眼鏡雲端加值的醫療應用 )
Among the tech elite, Google Glass is a sleek symbol of minimalist, futuristic cool.But several startups see deeper potential in Glass: the ability to heal wounds and save lives.
Pristine in Austin, Texas makes the app EyeSight, which enables physicians and nurses to transmit live video and audio of wound patients from Glass to authorized computers, smartphones and tablets. After months of a pilot program at UC Irvine, the startup said this week it will soon roll out the technology at outpatient wound care clinics operated by Wound Care Advantage in Southern California.
"We're really using this primarily as a tool, to help people connect where it was either not possible or practical before," said Kyle Samani, CEO of Pristine, which started last spring in Austin, Texas. "If, for whatever reason, the doctor is not physically here, we'll find the next best way to get him here."
For decades, telemedicine has been slowly working its way into the doctor's office in the form of desktops, laptops, digital cameras, tablets and other gadgets. Now comes Glass, which Google plans to make available to the public this year. And Pristine isn't the only company seeking to capitalize on the device's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, camera and voice activation in the medical world.
Augmedix, founded by two former Stanford University students, is working on a system that would roughly translate information from Glass' audiovisual stream directly into a patient's medical record. Healium, co-founded by a Mill Valley doctor, is also developing an app that would let doctors share patient information through Glass.
Linking patients, experts
In Pristine's case, a nurse will use Glass to stream a video of a patient's wound to a doctor, who will then decide whether he or she should examine the injury in person, said Mike Comer, CEO of Wound Care Advantage. The company operates or helps run wound care clinics in hospitals, which involves providing equipment and hiring and training personnel to deal with chronic injuries.
"It's a way for us to bring experts to patients very quickly, very seamlessly," Comer said.
Chronic wounds, a market worth $25 billion, offer a particularly promising opportunity for Glass because patients need constant monitoring and outpatient care. About 6.5 million patients in the United States suffer from the condition, according to the National Institutes of Health. These wounds, such as diabetic ulcers and venous ulcers, can take more than six weeks to heal.
Since October, Pristine has been testing EyeSight through a pilot program with surgeons and anesthesiologists at UC Irvine.
Dr. Leslie Garson, one of the anesthesiologists, said Glass has proved useful during the 15 or so surgeries he has worked on so far, especially because he often monitors two or even three surgeries simultaneously.
"A resident could have Google Glass on, they could be looking at a monitor, and I could have a tablet down the hall and could see exactly what they're seeing," he said. "They can send me an alert - 'Take a look at this,' 'Is this something I should be concerned about?' "
Still, Glass, like any new technology, has skeptics.
San Jose doctor skeptical
Dr. Peter Schubart, director of the Wound Care Clinic at O'Connor Hospital in San Jose, doesn't see a great advantage in Glass. Schubart and his staff constantly take digital photographs of wounds and upload them to the electronic medical record system. It takes all of 20 seconds, he said. He also wonders if insurers and Medicare will still compensate him if he determined, by way of Glass, that a patient didn't require in-person treatment. Under health care reform, Samani said insurers will increasingly pay for quality of care instead of the standard fee-for-service model.
Consumer advocates have also raised concerns that hackers might steal sensitive patient information. To allay those fears, Pristine executives say the company offers the only commercially available Glass software that complies with the federal government's strict rules on patient privacy. EyeSight's encrypted video stream is strictly live, Samani said.
"Videos are not being saved, not even for a microsecond," he said. "We don't want anyone to feel the world is watching."
Over the long term, Pristine plans to bring Glass into intensive-care units, emergency rooms and ambulances. Samani wouldn't disclose how much it costs for hospitals to sign up but believes Glass offers plenty of opportunities in health care. Over the next month, wound care centers of three hospitals, including the University of Southern California's Verdugo Hills Hospital, will use the device.
Even Schubart, the skeptic, said he will keep an open mind about the new technology.
"I've learned to never say never," he said.
The NYPD Is Testing Google Glass ( 谷哥眼鏡雲端加值的美國警察 )
According to a report by VentureBeat, The New York City Police Department is currently investigating how useful Google Glass could be in the fight against the city's crime.
It's claimed that the department recently took delivery of several pairs of Google's smart glasses. "We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we're trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes," a New York City law enforcement official told VentureBeat. "We're looking at them, you know, seeing how they work."
If it's true, it's no real surprise. Last summer, a federal judge ruled that New York City's "stop-and-frisk" violated the rights of minorities in the city. In her recommendations accompanying the ruling, Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered the NYPD to test wearable cameras in five precincts where the controversial search tactic was used. Google Glass could fill that role perfectly.
A Google employeetold VentureBeat that the company hadn't been working with the NYPD, and said that the law enforcement agency had "likely acquired the glasses through the Google Glass Explorer program." That will have involved the typical application and subsequent ponying up of $1,500 per pair.
Of course, whether each and every NYPD cop should be toting a camera on their face remains to be seen. Evidence from experiments in other parts of the country suggest cameras encourage police to behave better, as well as protecting them from fraudulent reports of abuse. Critics—including Mayor Mike Bloomberg—argue the data they collect will create an enforcement nightmare. What do you guys think?
Google Glass Eyed for Wearable Soldier Gear ( 谷哥眼鏡雲端加值的美軍 )
Army officials have been after a way to outfit soldiers with wearable computers for years, but have repeatedly failed to find a system that both delivers information coherently and avoids impairing troops’ perception of the battlefield.
The military’s notoriously Byzantine process by which it develops and adopts technology may not be entirely to blame, engineers that bridge both government and commercial technology spheres tell National Defense.
While parts of the military suffer from an “institutional rejection of innovation,” even in the swifter commercial sector wearable computers have generally been failures until recent advances, said John Clark, chief innovation officer for Thermopylae Sciences and Technology.
Based in Arlington, Va., Thermopylae specializes in taking commercially available technologies and converting them to military and government use.
“For years, people have been trying to make wearable computing happen, but to be honest … they have all been terrible,” Clark says.
The Army found that out the hard way during several efforts to create a wearable situational awareness and computing system for soldiers. So far, the service has nothing to show for its efforts.
“But there has been some really cool innovation that has happened in late 2012, early 2013,” Clark said. “How can we take those emergent technologies, and make them implementable and affordable for government and commercial clients?”
The most notable entry recently into the mobile-computing market is Google Glass, about 1,500 of which are in the hands of testers like Clark. Other companies, including a startup called Oculus VR, have developed or are in the process of bringing to market similar wearable computing devices.
While Glass was not developed for military applications, its importance is the awareness the device brings to the possibility of ubiquitous mobile computing, Clark said.
“For all the work Google has put into it, there is no real desire to take [Glass] and apply it directly to a military mission,” he said. “This is a consumer product. But because of what Google has done … there will be other similar models that are perhaps ruggedized that can apply directly to [special operations forces]. Or, it will inspire people to integrate the technology into riflescopes or night vision goggles.”
The point of Google Glass is to develop a revolutionary method of interacting with technology — to figure out the optimum way to deliver information and have the user digest it without distraction. Currently, the system performs only rudimentary tasks like sending text messages, taking photos and video and receiving news and social media alerts. Eventually, Glass or an evolutionary version will allow more sophisticated applications.
Instead of a pair of glasses or a monocle with a heads-up display, Glass positions a small prism over the upper right corner of the wearer’s right eye. The user can either slide a finger along the arm of the device or speak directly to it to perform a number of tasks like reading email or taking photos. The prism becomes transparent and is all but unnoticeable when not in use. There are no lenses or screens over the eyes, so the wearer can naturally hold a conversation or walk, unobstructed, even when the screen is activated.
The technology has gained the attention of scientists and engineers who develop and purchase equipment for the special operations community. However, concerns were expressed in May at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference that Google Glass in its current form could harm operators’ eyesight. Attention is being paid to what Google is doing with Glass, but extensive human trials will be necessary before a special operations sniper wears a pair on the battlefield, SOF officials said.
Raytheon is marketing a wearable joint tactical air controller system that allows ground forces to tag elements in the environment using a helmet-mounted monocle that covers the whole eye but is see-through. That system consists of a chest-mounted computer, the monocle and a smartphone worn on the wrist or elsewhere. It allows a soldier to call in an air strike on a target simply by viewing it through the eyepiece and clicking the phone’s screen.
Though only recently unveiled at the 2013 Paris Air Show, Raytheon’s Advanced Warfighter Awareness for Real-time Engagement (AWARE) system resembles similar concepts the Army has tested to provide computing and communication capabilities to soldiers.
Future Force Warrior, developed in conjunction with the now-defunct Future Combat Systems, sought to create a lightweight, integrated mobile computing system for soldiers. It was one in a series of “network-centric” infantry combat projects the military undertook during the past decade. Others included the Soldier Integrated Protective Ensemble and Land Warrior. The latter was canceled in 2007, then resurrected the following year under the name Nett Warrior. The program is designed to use both commercial, off-the-shelf technologies and existing military gear to extend communications and command and control to individual troops.
When the Army attached smartphones to rifleman radios and gave them to troops during a 2011 network integration evaluation, soldiers said they were receiving too much information.
“There’s no need for me to have this,” Army Pvt. David Kramlich said then of the Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P) Handheld. He said troops of his rank don’t need to be overloaded with information that is used to make command decisions.
The JBC-P provides GPS and voice communications. It can be used to plan missions, receive sensor feeds, mark buildings and rooms that have been cleared, communicate via text message and track friendly and enemy forces, much like Raytheon’s AWARE system.
Nett Warrior is a similar system that began years ago as a weighty suite of wearable computers that has since been shrunk down to individual phones and tablets carried in pouches or pockets.
Consensus among soldiers and their leaders at the NIE was that not every soldier needs Nett Warrior and that systems that require soldiers to consult a smartphone in battle are distracting.
With Glass, Google is trying to arrive at how users can access information without having to look down at a separate screen. Test wearers like Clark and his brother, Thermopylae President A.J. Clark, are helping the company figure out how to deliver information through the device and what applications are most useful.
“We need to make sure these applications work in a wearable environment,” A.J. Clark said. “A smartphone is one construct, a laptop is another. Wearable is taking it to a new dimension.”
“Google provides a very strong foundational layer. They invest tons of resources to make these technologies stronger and keep up with the edge of technology,” he added. “We are at the application level and then at the end, the government gets the added value of all that investment through the strata.”
分析
- 谷哥眼鏡 Google Glass 加速往雲端應用發展讓 Google 生意模式產生新的創新；
- 谷哥眼鏡 Google Glass 雲端加值服務之產品策略將使 Google 未來在雲端服務產值提高；
- 智能穿載式雲端應用將成為雲端加值服務之趨勢；
