i-pot:
A Non-Command Internet Appliance i-pot:
A Non-Command Internet Appliance
The mobile Internet may well creep, practically undetected, into people's homes disguised as familiar, immobile appliances. Installation? What installation? Just turn something on and it's online. For example: Japan's Zojirushi Corp. recently released the i-pot, an Internet-enabled hot pot that dispenses boiling water for tea. Hot pots are common, everyday items in Japanese homes. This hot pot, however, does more. In addition to boiling and dispensing water, i-pots send usage statistics to a website that tracks users' tea-drinking patterns. Caregivers can monitor a user's well-being by watching for breaks in their tea-drinking routine, which are indicated in twice-daily email reports or by checking a website. The target market for the i-pot is elderly people whose children or grandchildren might live too far away to monitor them directly. The beauty of the i-pot is that Grandma needn't learn new tricks to use it. As the figure shows, i-pot looks like a regular hotpot. The design protects Grandma from the technology, because she isn't forced to learn a new interface for a familiar object. If Grandma wants tea, she simply makes it. When she fills the i-pot with water, it sends a signal (using NTT DoCoMo's DoPa data packet communication service) to Fujitsu servers, where a report is created and posted to a website. In the report shown here, blue marks indicate when the user turned on the machine, green marks show when the user added water, and red marks show the period in which the machine remained on, keeping the water warm.
-Found on Useit.com