Amazon Alexa's Care Hub assists seniors in providing home-based care

‘Amazon Effect’ on Senior Living Grows With Care Hub Launch, Alexa for Hospitality Tools (Senior Housing News)
By Tim Mullaney
https://seniorhousingnews.com/2020/11/16/amazon-effect-on-senior-living-grows-with-care-hub-launch-alexa-for-hospitality-tools/

Alexa Care Hub: New Alexa feature to help elderly relatives (Gearbrain)
https://www.gearbrain.com/amazon-alexa-care-hub-explained-2648873067.html

Care Hub FAQ at Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=21400839011#:~:text=The%20Care%20Hub%20is%20located,list%20to%20access%20the%20feature.

How to use Amazon Alexa's Care Hub (Lifehacker)
https://lifehacker.com/check-in-on-family-members-using-amazons-alexa-care-hub-1845669176

How to use the Alexa Care Hub to care for aging loved ones (CNet)
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-use-the-alexa-care-hub-to-care-for-aging-loved-ones/

How Smart Home Tech is Making Tasks Easier

Kes: Ironically, I spent this morning talking to a healthcare consumer group about failures in healthcare, and one of the things I mentioned is that actually, yes, health insurance groups do consider smart home tech, including something as inexpensive as an Alexa, a luxury, and are always turning down requests for these technologies, although the companies themselves do not seem to employ assistive technology professionals who are qualified to conduct evaluations of consumers's needs and make appropriate recommendations.

How Smart Home Tech Is Making Tasks Easier, Improving Accessibility
November 17, 2020
https://www.boia.org/blog/how-smart-home-tech-is-making-tasks-easier-improving-accessibility

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow, smart devices keep getting smarter. Consumers can now find affordably priced smart speakers, smart locks, video doorbells, and even smart window coverings — and for the
61 million American adults living with disabilities,
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html
smart home devices aren’t mere novelties. IoT tech has significantly improved accessibility by opening up new ways to interact with devices, often at a fraction of the cost of traditional assistive technologies.

And because smart home devices can be programmed to interact and change based on conditions, users have considerable control over the way that they function. Exploring a few real-world applications of smart home technology provides some insight into the way that real people live — and how new technologies can promote accessibility.

Some smart devices tend to follow the principles of accessibility by default
Smart gadgets cut down on labor and make many tasks easier, and because the devices don’t rely on a single set of controls, they can remove some challenges for people with disabilities. People with vision disabilities can use voice commands, while people with speech disabilities can input commands via smartphones, tablets, or other devices
(Google’s Assistant app,
https://www.androidcentral.com/google-assistant-finally-same-phones-and-google-home

...for instance, now provides the same functionality through text as the Google Home, the company’s voice assistant technology).

In the smart home ecosystem, people have options. Tasks can be automated, controlled remotely, or scheduled to the user’s preferences, which opens up thousands of possible accommodations.

That’s important because people don’t follow a script. For a smart home device to be truly "smart," it needs to be adaptive, capable of changing to meet the needs of the consumer. By virtue of their design, smart home devices fulfill many of the
goals of accessibility
https://www.boia.org/blog/what-are-the-four-major-categories-of-accessibility
— they’re operable, adaptive to different types of users, perceivable in their functions, and robust enough to adapt to future technologies.

Expert advice on safely celebrating the holidays

https://scitechdaily.com/celebrating-the-holidays-heres-expert-advice-on-how-to-protect-your-family-from-covid-19/

Female MIT professor creates mini-satellites

Kes: What is it about small robots and other engineered objects that just makes you love them?
This story
https://scitechdaily.com/mits-mini-satellite-maker/
makes me think of
this post
https://kestrell.dreamwidth.org/361473.html
that I made about a small poetry-writing satellite that shows up in a John Varley story.

Los Angeles Times Book Club to host virtual meetup on Octavia E. Butler

Join the L.A. Times Book Club as we explore the legacy and
prolific writing of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler.
On Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. (PT)
journalist Lynell George, author of
“A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler,”
and Times reporter Julia Wick will discuss Butler’s work.
Born in Pasadena, Butler lived from 1947 to 2006 and was the first
science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” grant. George
based her new book about the author on research at the
Huntington Library’s Butler archives.
This fall, 27 years after publication, Butler’s novel
Parable of the Sower landed on both the
Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestseller lists.

Read more about the meetup and the series at
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/newsletter/2020-10-10/book-club-octavia-butler-lynell-george-book-club