Listening to the radio this morning I heard an interesting discussion on baby minders. But it wasn't about the usual audio baby monitors that allow you hear your child when you are in another room.No, no, they were discussing the existence of robot baby minders.
It seems these have been been around now for some time in Japan and the development has been lead by NEC and Sony.
Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield has been speaking at Cheltenham Science Festival and says that electronics multinationals were developing domestic robots that are already being heavily tested in 'childcare activities.'
He added: 'These robots are great for monitoring children. Adults can log into the robot from the Internet or from their mobile phones. They can direct the robot and see through its cameras, they can even speak to the children through the robot's voice.'
He went on to say that not only could robots do useful things like play games, they could also monitor children that had been electronically tagged using RFID technology.
Current UK legislation prevents robots from being left in charge of children in a nursery without adult supervision but there is nothing in law to stop parents from leaving robots in control at home it seems...
2 comments:
Get a Sony AIBO, or an R2D2 webcam - both allow you to watch via the internet and control their movement, and you can play with the AIBO too :)
anything but the real thing eh R?
;-)
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