We don’t really see the need for either, but researchers at both Carnegie Mellon and the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Canada are working on technology for phones that can sense when you’re busy working or talking to someone and so won’t ring and interrupt.
Each works in a different way. The Human Media Lab system is a visual sensor that attaches to a desktop phone and figures out from your blinks and gazes whether you can take a call or not. Carnegie Mellon’s SenSay is a combination of a light sensor, a motion detector, a microphone, and other sensors for cellphones which can guess what kind of environment you’re in (say, a noisy garage) and then decide whether or not to put the call through or send back a text message saying you’re indisposed. The only thing is that neither of these improves on what we do right now when we get a call on our cellphone that we can’t or don’t want to take: we press the “End” button and the voice mail picks it up. We’d much rather do this than have our phone deciding when it’s ok to send a call through.
Read – SenSay [Thanks, Roland]
