Gadgetory

Xerox is one of the Giants of research and development their work is woven through the story of technology over the last 50 years they pioneered personal computing networking natural language processing and of course copying and laser printing I grew up a couple of miles from their palo alto research center or park and in a valley jammed with the world's best engineers it was revered recently I went back to the old stomping grounds to meet up with their CTO Sophie vandebrooke and see what's next the best way to predict the future is to invent it and to create it and that's what we continue to do park is in the business of innovation park was set up by xerox in 1970 in a burgeoning Silicon Valley thousands of miles from company headquarters in Rochester New York in every sense it was a team apart and within two years they were on to something big the Alto which many call the first personal computer good morning you come in here on this grab a cup of coffee or tea bread and the Xerox machine present your morning mail on a screen this one looks interesting let's take a look at this I think everybody on the radically should see this push a button and the information is sent electronically to similar units around the corner or around the world Digital Network telephony 1973 the legendary Alto personal computer that was 77 portable versions same year personal tablets a little earlier than I bet you thought 1992 over there look at that the granddaddy of the laser printer and you know about the mouse this is a big part of the history of Silicon Valley and the history of park but to this day let's face it Yusei Xerox they think copiers but you are moving into other directions especially with a new way of medical staff dealing with us as patients that's right the digital nurse research project that we are doing here a park will enable the nurses and the doctors to really have the information handy so you as a patient don't need to bother telling over and over again what pain you have or how you felt yesterday this is truly patient-centric as you can see it's a dissipation it shows all these characteristics what kind of medicine has he taken or what needs to happen today what are the lab results this unit on the wall is able to tell when a particular nurse not just any nurse but whoever's idea this is has entered the room and pull up the relevant information all about the patient and what needs to happen today what are the lab results urgent things not to do or up here we had specialists that have work practice expertise that go into hospital lift with the nurses for extended amount of time I really see what was the patient's challenges what really upset them what what upset the nurse is the fact that they have to spend so much time away from the bad side away from dealing with actual patient which is really what they love to do they found that nurses spend only about thirty percent of their time taking care of you at seventy percent doing routine chores like paperwork and filling medications with their digital nurse project the park team thinks it could flip that ratio but it clearly will make a huge impact to the patient so the hospital's have really been opening their doors I mean they've won innovate they want to be able to figure out how do I save costs in my hospital another line of research for Xerox in the medical field is heart monitoring that is not only wireless but involves no contact at all we are doing experiments today in a neonatal hospital in India their skins are very fragile very sensitive so you don't want to keep putting probes on baby serves yeah so our researchers are experts in image processing because of the decades of expertise making amazing images that we use different are now using their expertise to remotely monitor the signals coming up it is visual technology to monitor a heart that you can't even see yes that's correct and then they can measure remotely to the heartbeat so the the temperature that we're doing the experiment in the hospital now it's going to make a huge impact if indeed we can deploy that and many more babies it can benefit from this technology hopefully you'll never come into contact with Xeroxes medical technology but I bet you could use some help parking I was impressed by the smarts they're preparing to put into dumb meters and spaces on the typical day thirty percent of the traffic in cities because people are looking for a parking spot and here are some examples of what you found one of them is to take our driveways or curb cuts and to turn those into possible parking inventory so what we found out is that in forty-nine percent almost half of these situations they will never drive a car into this parking full of junk it's full of Chang or your mother-in-law oh that's fire so why not provide extra fifty percent more parking space and I love this meter here this earth at this mock-up of a meal that will be tied to a service cloud service the web-based service that you run in the cloud where you're going into the city tonight for some event you can log in the software will tell you were the closest free markets for this during the time that you're interested to park you pay for it at home and then you drive and the parking spot is empty waiting for you today we are working with talking with many cities is very very interested in this concept a less frustrated driver much easier flow of traffic through the city less pollution cleaner cities I mean it just makes a lot of sense park is one of maybe a handful of companies that can say it's in the business of breakthroughs and not elicit laughs I also think Park is notable in the way it combines deep technology with the study of how people work heal or just park their car and that allows them to create applied technology that can move things forward