I am reminded of a story of ‘some aged-care systems in Japan’ where robots are used to monitor residents in care. At one nursing home, a mobile robot goes from room to room during night time to silently observe sleeping residents and to report abnormal conditions to the charge nurse at control point. Another nursing home use robot toys (assigned to each residents as ‘pet’ to look after and ‘pal’ to talk to), the robot also monitor residents’ health indicators and report.

Would smart wristbands that can monitor students’ health, location, motion, and communication, and etc be developed and used in education? In stead of relying on ‘teachers’ to do assessments? Today’s mobile phones have capacity to be used as such while wrist-bands’ capacity is still much less but developing fast. Social and cultural impacts would be high and controversial.

To jump ahead, maybe we need a push first. ;-)