Opportunities for unintended applications
By Robert Cravotta, Technical Editor -- EDN, May 16, 2002
I always smile when I hear vendors mention that a customer is using one of their products in an unanticipated fashion in formerly unimagined applications. This phenomenon flourishes in an open community that ensures information and technology is freely available and allows individuals the opportunity to succeed, or more importantly, to fail, with minimal hindrance. How many seemingly ridiculous and doomed-to-fail ideas turn out to work? I was reminded of this unimagined-application concept when I received a number of e-mails regarding my EDN hands-on project about gaming (Reference 1).
The project began as a way to allow my daughter to play with her friend who lives a few miles away. With a little research, the project became an inexpensive and portable platform to simplify user-interface-product controls and to do portable, terminal applications. I know many people use Nintendo Gameboy (www.nintendo.com) for interesting hobbies, as well as educational and commercial applications, but seeing a description for low-cost, portable medical equipment that uses this platform gave me new insights into Gameboy's possibilities (Reference 2).
For fun, I toyed around with finding a use for the more than 60 million Gameboy Colors that are, or will soon be, trash. With that in mind, you could potentially build an inventory of programmable devices for myriad unintended applications. The purpose is to allow you to trade in your operating Gameboy Color for, say, $10. This idea could provide a reasonable base of devices for a second life as an educational platform for embedded-engineering students or for business applications. The logistics of doing this project are significant and require a company, such as a national retail-electronics chain, to do it cost effectively. If a retailer is the point of contact, it can offer customers a store credit instead of cash. Unfortunately, I'm not sure you can justify the effort and expense that such a project would involve for educational and culturally untested business applications. Medical equipment, on the other hand, gives this idea some plausibility.
Medical-diagnostic equipment can play an important role in the quality and cost of health care. The effectiveness of such equipment goes beyond precision and includes its timeliness and usability when it is most necessary. The ability to get quick and usable medical diagnostics in the field, where time is of the essence, is where low-cost, completely self-contained medical diagnostic equipment shines. Using a cartridge-slot extension, such as in a Gameboy-like device, allows the equipment to quickly change function while retaining the same user interface. Such devices can balance the critical trade between the urgency of availability and accuracy, and cost. If the fidelity of these devices can support urgent field-condition decisions, a low-cost platform would encourage such devices on a huge scale. Even more significant, such devices could bring medical-diagnostic equipment to regions that currently have little or none.
Going through this exercise reminds me of an excerpt from the formal statement at the Order of the Engineer Web site, which says, "Engineers have vitalized and turned to practical use the principles of science and the means of technology. Were it not for this heritage of accumulated experience, my efforts would be feeble" (Reference 3). It is humbling to realize that even new and original ideas build on the work of others. Balance this notion by realizing that your work, if properly disseminated, may lead to unintended applications that were previously impossible.
References
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Cravotta, Robert, "Gaming as serious business ," EDN, Feb 7, 2002, pg 48.
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Portable Modular Diagnostic Medical Device, Patent no. 5,876,351.
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Order of the Engineer, www.order-of-the-engineer.org.
| Author Information |
 Contact me at rcravotta@cahners.com. |
