BPN 1566 World Summit Award Winners 2011 Category 2

"WSA - Turning the United Nations Targets on the Information Society regarding Local Content into Global Action towards the 2015 Review !"

Category 2:e-Health & Environment

2004 SPARX New Zealand
2031 COLLAPSUS Netherlands
2039 EPI Life Singapore
2040 Beijing Traditional Chinese Medicine Digital Museum China
3012 Verdeate.com Colombia

SPARX, New Zeeland, University of Auckland

URL: http://www.frozenflameweb.com/sparxmain.html
Description: By the age of 18 a quarter of young people have suffered from clinical  depression and a massive three quarters of them never get any help. There are good therapies, but they can be expensive, there is a shortage of therapists and young people may be reluctant to talk about their problems. For the current generation of "digital natives" computers may provide a solution. SPARX is a computerised self-help programme designed to deliver cognitive behavioural therapy, one of the best psychological treatments available for depression. SPARX is an animated 3D game where users learn real-life skills by solving challenges to rid a fantasy world from gloom and
negativity. It was developed by therapists in collaboration with young people, computer games developers, and is grounded in e-learning theories. It has been designed to appeal to young people internationally. An evaluation of SPARX (187 participants) has shown that young people found it effective, engaging and helpful.

COLLAPSUS, Netherlands, Submarine
URL: www.collapsus.com
Description: Collapsus looks into the near future and shows you how the imminent energy transition affects a group of ten young people, who appear to be caught up in an energy conspiracy. What will their world look like after the turbulent transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources? Following the adventures of Vera, Jack, Tony and Amir, you are lead into a world of conspiracy, treason and, most alarmingly, failing energy supplies. In this story, set in the near future, the international powers try to cope with a transition from fossil to alternative fuels, while dealing with political dissension, uprisings and a population terrified by increasingly frequent black-outs. As a player, you are required to make decisions that leave their mark on a national and a global scale, in your quest to find solutions to the energy crisis.

EPI Life, Singapore, EPHONE INTERNATIONAL (S) PTE LTD
URL: www.epi.com.sg
Description: EPI Life is the World's First mobile phone with integrated ECG
(Electrocardiogram) and health monitoring functions. It allows the user to record their ECG anytime, anywhere, simply by touching the sides of the phone with their fingers, eliminating the need for complicated electrodes or messy gels. Other than ECG, it also allows the user to input key health parameters such as Blood Glucose, Blood Pressure and Cholesterol and transmit these data to their online Personal Health Folder via the EPI Life, which can be accessed by the user via the internet. ECGs are sent to EPI’s 24-hour Health Concierge from the device via GPRS, where qualified doctors and cardiac technicians compare the ECG against the user’s baseline ECG, and respond via SMS based on the results of the comparison. EPI Life, coupled with the 24-hour Health Concierge and online Personal Health Folder, offers an end-to-end solution for remote health monitoring, allowing the end-user to have timely feedback (on-demand) on their heart condition anytime, anywhere.

Beijing Traditional Chinese Medicine Digital Museum, China, Beijing Traditional Chinese Medicine International Exchange and Cooperating Center (BTCMIECC)
URL: www.tcm-china.info
Description: Beijing Digital Museum of Traditional Chinese  Medicine is a top science museum and a website to spread and propagate culture of traditional Chinese medicine and scientific knowledge to the world. Beijing Digital Museum of Traditional Chinese Medicine has two versions: English and Chinese. There are many columns, such as medical care, Chinese material medicine, acupuncture, health and life, Qigong, Tuina, imperial court medicine, culture and history, cosmetic treatment, education, science and technology and international exchange.


Verdeate.com, Colombia, Ideas Online
URL: http://www.verdeate.com/
Description: VERDEate.com enables individuals and organizations to create progressively new environmentally friendly habits in their consumption routines through our "Green challenges". These challenges motivate action in a massive and different way through the current web and social media technologies. Through our green challenges users understand the relation between their habits and Climate Change, gain control over their own CO2 emissions and we are able to address the climatic issue from the root. Here’s an example of a Green Challenge that any user (person or organization) can take: "don’t eat meat in the following 2 weeks". This produces a reduction of 5.95 Kg of CO2. Get all of our challenges here [Spanish] http://www.verdeate.com/verdeate/retos


BPN 1566

Cross-country for cross-media (9)

Mattias Arvola of Södertörns University College made explorations with his students into interaction design for nature experience. The basic question was: how can interaction design be used to advance information design, interactive services, and in the end increase the tourist attraction at nature reserves and national park? Some 60 interaction design and media technology students they developed initial concepts and early prototypes of interactive services. These areas studied were guides, routes, events, games, installations and websites.

Guides are of course the most likely candidates for interactive services. They can range from stationary versions such as installations, points of information, billboards and websites to interactive versions on mobile phones, PDAs or even dedicated mobile devices with the possibility to of GPS positioning. Some of the guides were community based, e.g. bird watchers. Most curious but interesting was a design concept whereby people would walk around with a small log of wood. The log had a hole through which you could listen, but also talk or blow into it. The main input was given by blowing.

Routes were another area of investigation. Also here mobile devices could be used. But also games can be used to make a route interesting. One of the students developed a route whereby kids could create an animal, learn about what it was doing and then track the animal on a PDA.

And why not use an online dating service to bring people together for a visit to the woods and even have a dinner there?

Installations were one of the favourites for explorations. One novel idea was to have a screen projection of a woman who lived in the lake and showed shots of other places and times. Another idea was to develop a living tree by which a face would be projected on the tree and kids could hug the computer augmented face on the tree (see illustration; design by Johan Blomkvist, Ruken Cetiner, Oskar Jeremias and Sara Schill Saran). Another interesting idea was the use of stationary mixed-reality binoculars. When people look through them and turn them in different directions, additional information would be given.

Websites were used for preparing a visit, but they were also used after a visit. They were also used for community building, using geo-tagged photographs. In one project, a family at home could track their father on a fishing expedition and see the photographs he took immediately after he had taken them (I guess of the whale he caught).

Several ideas were based on embodied multimodal experiences such as interaction techniques like blowing and hugging, touch, movement, sound and light, but also instrumental and social issues. (social web, sharing photographs, ranking them). Of course location based technologies such as WiFi triangulation, GSM triangulation, GPS, RFID, Bluetooth and barcode readers were explored.

In the ideas presented the students made use of features like cross-platform applications, multiple platform applications, embodied multi-modal experiences, user generated content and location-based information. This is a mouthful. Yet Mattias Arvola was realistic about the explorations as he considered them a mirror of our zeitgeist. He would love to see what students had made of these projects ten years ago and ten years from now.

(BTW An example of nature experience can also be found in The Netherlands. In a wetland area near our offices a sea eagle pair has made its nest and is brooding. Like last year the nature organisation has put up a webcam)

Blog Posting Number: 714

Tags: nature, environment, cross-media

Aussies and Kiwis sampling Dutch broadband (8)

Cisco was the host for the Australian and New Zealand Trade Mission in Amsterdam. And out of courtesy Cisco was put on the program to say something about the company. And I - thought that we were going to hear a lot about the boxes they sell. But the Cisco representative Mr Nicola Villa, director public sector; Internet Solutions Group of Cisco Systems International, had a surprising story.

He started from the broadband end. He distinguished three phase in the development of broadband:
- backbone focus with connectivity problems;
- access focus with upgrades to Fibre to the Home and wireless;
- content services focus with the scaling up of services.
Geographically phase 1 takes place in Catalunya (Spain), Italy and Greece. An exception to this situation in Italy is FastWeb in Milan, which offers access services to 0,5 million users: internet; soccer and sports; video surveillance. In the Netherlands we are moving from the access focus to content services. Stockholm (Sweden) has reached phase 3 and is working on financial sound, social and sustainable content services.

Presently Cisco finds itself in phase 3 and is developing content services and other services in the field of mobility, technology and environment. Cisco wants to use broadband to solve environmental problems. To that end Cisco has associated itself with the Clinton Global Initiative, connecting urban development with environment. One of the initiatives is the carbon to collaboration program. Cisco has set 20 million US dollar apart for 5 years to reduce carbon in the cities of Amsterdam, Seoul and Los Angeles. Cisco aims at reducing 60 percent of the carbon output it produces amongst others with travelling. For this reason it has developed its tele-presence solution, which eyes like you have all the people in the meeting on the same table. At the same time the company will invest 20 million US dollar in collaborative software to make tele-working more effective.

The idea of the program is to reduce energy consumption. Together with the municipality of Amsterdam an attempt will be made to empty six buildings by an integrated policy of nomadic working (working at home or at tele-presence centres, traffic management, using public transport, smart communities and new urban business. In Singapore every car has a RFID used for road charging, but also congestion. In Paris Public transport is using wifi to optimise the use of buses. And there are more green models under development, which move from a centralised to a distributed situation. Problem is often that governance is missing. Once projects in the Clinton Global Initiative are working, they will be copied to other cities.

Blog Posting Number: 699

Tags: broadband, environment, RFIDbroadband, environment, RFID