Even before the pandemic closed our buildings, necessitated social distancing, and gave sudden prominence to our online offerings and services, many libraries had already ventured into less familiar digital territories to explore new ways to connect with and build their communities. They did so to reach the underserved, those in the community who were either unable or disinclined to physically visit the library building and engage with the services there.

Take teens, for example. Two popular online platforms that teenagers frequent are Discord and Twitch. Some libraries, trying to meet this age group where they are, have pioneered the use of these services before and during the current crisis. Now, more than ever, such virtual online spaces are worth boldly engaging with to conduct library programming and outreach.

Allow me to dig out my trusty highlighter, and let’s begin…

Today’s highlights: Discord and Twitch

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What is Discord?

It’s a digital community gathering space, an app described as “Slack for gamers”. Picture a customizable chat channel with the integration of text, images, audio, and video.

Discord was created by gamers for that specific community: a shared space online to socialize, chat, share content, discuss strategy, and keep up with their games remotely and asynchronously.

Despite its gamer origins, Discord has many versitile applications including education and business. Any organization can use it to conduct outreach, communication, and facilitate community building.

So it’s a perfect fit for libraries!

How are libraries using Discord?

Here are a few ways the platform is being used in libraries today:

• Book clubs
• Dungeons & Dragons games
• Genealogy workshops
• Internal staff communication
• Professional discussions

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What is Twitch?

Twitch is the world’s most popular social live streaming site. Like Discord, it came out of the world of gamers. Besides being where most eSports competitions are broadcast, Twitch is the place to watch game-based talk shows or individual streamers playing their favorite video games while giving their own self-commentary. Participants watching the live stream can interact with the streamer directly or access the archived recordings on-demand. Unlike YouTube, where watching videos is usually free, and content creators are paid solely via advertising revenue, Twitch employs a subscription service and popular streamers receive payment from their subscribers.

Twitch isn’t just for games. There are a number of creative artists on Twitch – anything from sculptors to musicians – streaming the live creation of their work for an audience willing to give them immediate (and I mean immediate) feedback.

How are libraries using Twitch?

Digital literacy: To stream one’s one content, Twitch can be particularly complex to set up and use effectively with regard to its hefty hardware, software, and network requirements. This makes it a fantastic tool to introduce teens to crucial (and lucrative) digital literacy skills. Considering the growing rise in the number of female gamers, there’s an opportunity here to engage teen girls with the platform and encourage them to develop skills in this area and potentially pursue STEAM careers.

Despite its popularity with teens, over half of Twitch’s users are between 18-34 so libraries may want to consider using it to provide adult services as well.

Here are some ideas for how libraries could use Twitch:

• Support an eSports program
• Stream programs, workshops, and presentations for homebound patrons or ones outside of geographical area
• Engage guest speakers for programming without requiring travel.and including special interactive component
• Teach resume classes
• Play bad movies and host a community heckle

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If you’d like to learn more about these two popular platforms, I highly recommend this introductory presentation for last year’s Library 2.0 conference.by Michael Dunbar-Rodney and Pamela Van Halsema from San Antonio Public Library. Besides giving a great overview, itcovers many of the emerging best practices for those libraries wishing to use Discord and Twitch themselves.

> Presentation recording (MP4, 30 mins): Twitch & Discord in Public Libraries: New Opportunities for Adult Services

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Has your library done anything with Twitch or Discord, especially during the pandemic? Let me know. I’d love to hear about it.

A big thanks to LDN Office Assistant Tomas Mendez for his help developing the content for this month’s highlight!

Back in late summer of 2019 (remember those halcyon days?), I noticed that May 2, 2020 was ‘International Drone Day’. So I planned a Henry’s High-tech Highlight post for this week on that topic. 

The world is in a different place now than when I penciled that into my calendar. But as the week of May 2 approached, it struck me as still being an interesting highlight for this time.

You may recall that in 2013, Amazon announced plans to start a drone delivery service. I recollect feeling wonder-struck at this futuristic concept becoming real, imagining that our lives would soon become even more like science fiction. I thought the sight of autonomous flying robots zipping about their business above us as we conducted our lives down on the ground would soon become commonplace. Drones weren’t new in 2013; they had become a popular item for consumers a few years before. Once they had cameras attached and could be controlled by our smartphones, people wanted to give them a spin. Many libraries were quick to embrace this exciting new technology and began offering programming to showcase how it worked, as well as checking them out to patrons to try out at home.

Fast forward to today. It’s been seven years and Amazon’s drone delivery service has yet to take flight. Doesn’t it sure sound nice right about now? Many of us are social distancing and having varying degrees of difficulty in receiving even basic supplies like toiletries, pharmaceuticals, and groceries. Although items can be delivered directly to our homes, we rely on human drivers who may be putting themselves at risk. A remote-controlled robot that descends from the sky to drop toilet paper on my doorstep? Yes, please.

To some, drones may seem like they’re passe, a passing fad, part of a hypothetical future that never came to be. But despite the lack of an Amazon delivery highway in the skies above our neighborhoods, we’ve come a long way in the last ten years.  There are a lot of really exciting things going on that I’d love to highlight for you. Drones are still worth buzzing about.

Today’s highlight: Drones

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COVID-19 and Drones

It’s been interesting to see how emerging technologies can, well, emerge during times of crises such as what we’re going through now.  Before we get to more general uses for drones, here are some instances when drones have been deployed in the pandemic:

• To deliver supplies to residents: If you are a resident of Christiansburg, Virginia, you can already experience what it would be like to get your supplies via drone at this time. Google has a pilot project there called Wing launched in September 2019 with little idea they would be testing things out during a pandemic six months later.

• To enforce social distancing (in China, France, New Jersey, Florida, etc.):
  
  Camera drones survey public areas for citizens violating social distancing rules, and through an intercom, are scolded by the authorities.
  
  
• To take temperatures and even issue fines:
  
  A heat map captured by a drone can determine people’s temperatures and alert nearby law enforcement to intervene if there are fevers.
  
  
  Source; Image Credit: AFP
  
  
  Police surveillance to track people raises many privacy concerns. The ACLU sued Baltimore this month regarding the city’s new “eye in the sky” surveillance program.

• To disinfect:
  
  
  • At hospitals, institutions, parks, etc.

• Inside with ultraviolet light

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Outside of COVID-19, drones are still taking off. An article in the Wall Street Journal from last October outlined a lot of their upward momentum (sorry, I can’t not make drone puns).

Here’s a rundown of uses for drones you may not be aware of:

Medical

• Blood
  • In Rwanda, they can cut a treacherous 4-hour road journey to just 30 minutes. Drones delivered 5,500 units of blood to Rwandan regional hospitals over a12-month period, leading to a reduction in maternal deaths and fewer cases of malaria-induced anemia! Source: beautifulnews.daily
    
• Medicine
  • Even DIY to help stranded neighbors during flooding

Farming and pest control

• Drones with crop sensors significantly improve the efficiency of agricultural inputs, such as fertilizers and water, and improve environmental impact. It saves the farmers thousands of dollars every year. Though primarily used for grains, a recent study is exploring how drones can even help fruit growers by:
  • taking inventory of tree height and canopy volume
  • monitoring tree health and quality;
  • managing water, nutrients, pests and disease in-season;
  • estimating fruit/nut production and yield; and,
  • creating marketing tools (videos for promotion of the orchard, or sale of trees and fruit).
• Pesticide-spraying to accelerate sustainable farming
• Eradicate locust swarms ravaging crops to curb hunger crises
• Planting trees by firing “seed missiles” to restore the world’s forests
• Dropping baits to poison invasive wilderness pests to support indigenous wildlife and with enough accuracy to avoid endangered species

Drone photos to 3D Print

Here’s a cool idea: Use your drone to take photos of of a subject (like a building), and then make it with a 3D printer.

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Other compelling applications

• Firefighting
• Improving internet access in underserved areas
• Tracking poachers to protect wildlife
• Conducting safety inspections
• As a source of renewable energy
• As AI-controlled swarms to autonomously explore
• As robot bees to pollinate crops (as Walmart patented for in 2018)

Speaking of swarms and insects…

Check out this recent video from PBS of a camera drone disguised as a hummingbird which was able to capture never before seen footage of monarch swarms:

Source

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Libraries and Drones

Anything new going on?

Thanks for asking. Here are a few I found:

• Delivering books, naturally (still a bit of a ways off though)

• Scanning shelves to conduct inventories (happening in Japan)
  
  
  Source: A librarian monitors a flying drone to scan bookshelves at a library in the Nishifuna 1-chome district of Funabashi, Chiba Prefecture, on March 12. (Shigeo Hirai)

And finally, as suggested by our Inclusive Services Consultant Laura Tadena, you can do something right now, even if your library building is closed:

Suggest a drone simulation video game to teens currently at home. They can get started playing with this emerging technology and practice flying one until they get the real thing. Here’s a free one.

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What about you? Anything I missed about drones? Send any further ideas, even flights of fancy (sorry), to ld@tsl.texas.gov care-of Henry Stokes.

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A big thanks to LDN Office Assistant Tomas Mendez for his help researching links for this month’s highlight!

Hi there, Henry here! Last year, on this hair-raising holiday, I highlighted a double dose of dreadful technologies to scare the smart pants off you. This time around, I’m going to escalate the eeriness up to eleven by trick-or-treating you to a triple threat of alarming innovations. Today’s highlights are:

1. Smart Dust
2. WiFi Recognition
3. Digital Clone

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1. Smart Dust, what’s that?

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s real and just around the corner, soon to be billowing our way. Computers can be made the size of a grain of dust and light enough to float in the air. These clouds of smart dust can monitor the environment, gather data, and even take photographs.

The microelectromechanical (that’s a mouthful) systems (MEMS) may end up being self-powered too, harvesting energy using passive WiFi and the heat from our bodies

Here are more powers the potent particles may possess:

• Detect light, vibrations, acceleration, stress, pressure, humidity, sound
• Help with energy efficiency and environmental comfort in buildings
• Measure air quality
• Monitor crops and status of equipment
• Assist with health and medicine: e.g. doctors can diagnose without surgery; inhale smart dust instead of having an endoscope inserted

Of course, the dark side of the dust is that these undetectable particles could be used to track us. It’s not hard to imagine them being used for security, wirelessly monitoring people and products.

One day soon we may be seeing signs up that warn us:

“SMILE, the DUST is WATCHING.”

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2. WiFi Recognition, what’s that?

WiFi recognition is when WiFi and radio waves can track our physical movements and emotional states. Transmitters send out signals, and as we move through the signals, a device can see the signals bouncing off us and onto other objects. This allows the device to effectively see through the wall and track our movements. And the device can even tell we’re feeling freaked out by that. More on its empathic powers in a bit.

Here’s something appropriate for the season: MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has invented a way to recreate our skeleton via WiFi. Spooky!

It actually looks like this:

There are myriad uses for WiFi recognition. If health metrics are collected by our router, imagine it communicating with our smart home and automatically adjusting the appliances accordingly so we lead healthier lives. Or imagine a baby monitor that also collects the infant’s vital signs. It could also know we’re snoring and what state of sleep we’re in, thereby helping us with our sleep habits. Thanks for the health hacks, all-knowing WiFi!

Another MIT CSAIL creation, EQ-Radio, can detect emotions by collecting breath and heart rhythms from WiFi signals.

Maybe our emotionally intelligent WiFi routers will see how angry we get when they stop working and begin to apologize for once.

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3. Digital Clone, what’s that?

Generally we think of digital clones as the ones used in special effects in TV and movies: a fake, computer-generated version of, say, Tom Cruise, is made to appear hanging onto the side of a plane. Wait, that’s a bad example since I think Tom Cruise does a lot of his own stunts. Anyway, there’s another kind of digital cloning that doesn’t need a body to be represented. A personal chatbot or mebot is a deployable AI version of you. They learn from you and then represent you online. Conduct an interview, ask them anything, and your digital clone will behave just like you. Your friends can ask it questions if they don’t want to bother you or might be embarrassed by the line of inquiry. Now you no longer need to reach out directly to a person for certain pieces of information. For example, you could ask a clone:

• Do you have any food allergies or special dietary needs?
• What was your famous chocolate cookie recipe again?
• How are you feeling today? (If health metrics are involved and your partner is the clone, you could determine, without bothering the real person, what their current stress level is and see if they are up to visiting the in-laws.)
• What did you eat for breakfast this morning? Or where did you buy that dress? Works great for celebrities who can’t possibly answer every random question from fans.

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Library Role:

All three of these technologies are likely to cause a shiver to run down our spines. That’s okay. It’s good to be scared. It means we’re aware. It’s our job as library staff to heroically face down the horrors and negative side effects of potentially problematic emerging technologies on the behalf of our communities. When that tech with ethically questionable capabilities appears, look it right in the eye and seek to better understand the monster lurking inside. Remember: knowledge is power. And libraries can make a difference ensuring that our students and patrons are well-equipped and informed to make the right choices, have protected free speech, right to privacy – all that good stuff. We can’t do that if we put our heads in the sand.

So keep your heads up high, heroes!

And HAPPY HALLOWEEN, everyone!

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P.S. My recent webinar on Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality and libraries is now available for your viewing pleasure! Just click below to be taken to the shortcourse page that contains the archived recording link. Remember to log in and enroll if you want to receive 1 CE credit.

Usually when we think about wearables, items such as watches, clips, and bracelets come to mind. They’re special accessories that we put on – more like gadgets, really. But as time moves forward, the idea of a separate device to carry around will be less and less appealing to us. Instead, we’ll begin to prefer new technologies that directly and seamlessly integrate into the everyday clothing we already wear. 

Today’s highlight: Smart Garb

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The smartphone will go away one day. And to that I say, good riddance. I look forward to the time when I’ll see the looks of disgust and disbelief on the faces of my grandchildren as I reminisce about the old days :

“Back in my day, we used to carry this little mini – pocket computer device everywhere we went, and we would keep our eyes glued straight down at its tiny, barely even visible screen clutched in our hands instead of looking out at the world and each other.”

– Grandpa Henry

As Future Today Institute predicts, “We will transition from just one phone that we carry to a suite of next-gen communication devices, which we will wear and command using our voice, gesture and touch.”

Forget about all these devices and gadgets. Let’s just use what we already have – what we already wear.

Smart clothing isn’t just coming soon; it’s here! Allow me to take stock of what smart garb is already out there. You may be adding something like the following to your wardrobe now or in the near future:

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> Electronic textiles or ‘e-textiles’ to interact with your music, GPS, and phone

Levi’s Commuter x Jacuard is a smart jacket that is fashioned out of a specially designed denim sewn with conductive thread that only needs to be touched to connect to your smartphone.

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> Yoga pants to improve your ‘downward dog’

These pants are paired with an app to help you practice yoga better. It can detect your physical movements and compare your data to baselines. It’ll “nudge” you to walking, sitting, and downward-dogging better. Curate your own personal yoga class! (Examples: Nadi X, Pivot Yoga)

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> Pajamas to recover from workouts

Had a hard workout? Put these smart PJs on and help your muscles recover faster using infrared energy.

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> Swimsuits to prevent skin cancer

When the UV levels are high, the suit notices and alerts you to apply more sunscreen. Don’t trust your kids – or those sun-worshiping grown-ups whose skin you care about – to be careful about the Sun? The suits’ sensors can even be remotely monitored by the more responsible party (i.e. you).

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> Socks to prevent diabetes

Sensors in these socks detect levels of glucose or lactate in sweat and can even alert those with diabetes of the presence of foot ulcers, which can often result in amputations if not caught in time.

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> Belts for epilepsy and to help you diet

For epilepsy patients, there’s a belt that keeps tabs on your respiration rate and sweat build-up with an automatic alert to your loved one if something goes awry. There are also belts that use sensors and measurements to help give you feedback in your dieting efforts: tracking waist size, food intake, how much you’re sitting, etc – and there is even one that helps you with the opposite: they automatically loosen when you’ve overeaten so you don’t have to cease your feastin’.

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> Gloves to help you communicate

In Kenya, a researcher invented smart gloves called Sign-IO that can translate sign language into speech using gesture recognition.

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> Shoes to help with health, sports, visual impairment, falls, and personalized fashion

Walk a mile in these shoes… and the shoes will know you traveled a mile, plus a whole bunch of other things…

• Health:
  • Many smart shoes can measure your gait, calorie burn pace, distance, steps, stride, cadence – all helpful in regard to your fitness and health improvement efforts. There are safety shoes that monitor the posture of construction workers and prevent them from spending too much time at work crouching, kneeling, and on tip-toes. This will prevent fatigue and common injuries, plus lower back pain and sciatica. For those patients needing post-surgical evaluation, the shoes collect valuable data for their doctors to speed up recovery. Diseases can potentially be diagnosed as well.
• Sports:
  • Improve your athletic performance with your shoes’ assistance. Even your golf swing can be perfected
• Visual impairment:
  • A haptic-based navigation system in the shoes detects vibration in your feet, guiding you where you need to go. A person who was visually impaired ran a marathon wearing a pair!
• Aging population:
  • If the wearer falls, an alarm is triggered and the location is sent to a family member or friend. (E-vone)

And here’s a list of other “shoe”-per powers I’ve seen out there:

• Self-lacing, self-tightening
• Color changing / E-inking
• Heat up on cold days
• Audible real-time coaching feedback as you run
• Altitude measurement

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> Helmets to send for help in accidents

A number of helmets now have built in brake lights and turn signals. If the cyclist is struck or falls, the emergency contact is instantly alerted. Some use bone conduction speakers to help you safely play your music and make phone calls.

> Nail art to prevent skin cancer and premature aging

Like the aforementioned smart swimsuit, this adhesive-backed decorative nail art by L’Oreal contains sensors to measure the amount of UVA and UVB rays you’re being exposed to and presents the data to you via a smartphone app.

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> What about libraries?

Here is some food-for-thought on how smart garb intersects with libraries. Let me know if you have further ideas!

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Inclusive & Accessible Services

As described above, there are already numerous ways that smart garb can assist people with disabilities, epilepsy, diabetes, visual and speech impairments, risk of falling, recovering from surgery, etc., etc. – and more no doubt to come in the future. The service population benefiting from this technology is a large, important part of society – and as ALA writes, “libraries should be fully inclusive of all members of their community and strive to break down barriers to access.” Staff should stay up-to-date and pro-active in supporting how smart garb supports inclusion and accessibility.

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New Interfaces

If smart garb becomes more complex and widely adopted, and if it replaces smart phones in the future, there will need to be an entirely new haptic language (using sense of touch and motion, rather than speech, text, or touchscreens) so that we can communicate with the systems and interfaces we use in our day-to-day lives.

This would inevitably result in new ways to use library services. ALA Center for the Future sagely points out that “patrons may increasingly expect that their library experiences – search, navigation of the library space and stacks, or even reading time – would integrate wearables and the haptic feedback that they provide.”

Libraries will need to learn to speak ‘garblish’ (I’m coining the term; you heard it here first!) and help empower and enable those patrons who may be left behind as everything shifts to the new paradigm.

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Digital Divide

If smart clothing becomes as ubiquitous as the smart phone, how can we ensure that this new technology is made accessible to all strata of society so that all have the opportunity to succeed in the future? Providing access and “wearable literacy” may become part of the library’s mission. Some community members may not be able to afford certain articles of smart garb or may only need them during a particular time frame. Would libraries start adding clothing and accessories to their collections for circulation?

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Privacy Issues

Libraries should advocate for, educate about, and protect people’s privacy – and smart garb certainly poses significant risks in that regard. Security is paramount in ensuring personal biometric and location data isn’t abused by third parties. We don’t want to air our dirty smart-linen in public, so to speak. A recent Wired article outlined how Fitbit heart-rate data of a murder victim was admitted as evidence to try and convict a suspect. It contained this quote: “While you have the right to remain silent, your gadgets mostly do not.”

You should be aware of a new technology that is increasingly aware of you.

Today’s highlight… Persistent Recognition Systems

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What is it?

All around us are smart devices that monitor us in real-time, all the time. There are our cameras, tablets, and the smart phones in our pockets, of course. But there are also home speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home, plus doorbell cameras and security systems, cars, refrigerators, watches and other wearables – all possessing persistent recognition. These systems are getting installed in our day-to-day spaces at a constant pace. Analysts expect 75% of U.S. households will have smart speakers by 2025.

It’s not just the monitoring. Combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI), these devices can know personal things about us. Some can even tell whether we’re sick or angry. Your accent can help them determine which country you’re originally from. They can take in background noise and make deductions like super-powered private detectives. All of this serves the function of targeting consumers for marketing purposes. Alexa hears crying in the background, for example, and soon Amazon.com starts suggesting baby products for you to buy.

What’s special here is that we are persistently being recorded and our data recognized. These devices are always on, always listening; the data that’s collected is uploaded and stored in the Cloud. Our data is being mined in our homes and offices. And in the near future, it won’t just be the external world keeping its ears open to our data, but the inner world as well (literally inside our ears in some cases). We will have our internal states recorded and analyzed via sensors in hearables, injectables, etc.

What is it good for?

It’s easy to see why one would be concerned about persistent recognition systems for their threat to privacy and their potential use by data-controlling authoritarian governments who could bring about surveillance states. It’s natural to be wary.

But what about the amazing good this technology could bring? One of my science heroes is Poppy Crum, PhD Neuroscientist and Technologist, Chief Scientist at Dolby Laboratories at Stanford. I’ve had the privilege of seeing her speak a couple of times at the SXSW Interactive Festival, and in the last talk I saw, she did point out that, indeed, technology will know more about us than we know about ourselves. But she argues this doesn’t have to be a bad thing!

“Increased tracking and ubiquitous sensing can improve care and quality of life and mean greater autonomy and freedom.” – Poppy Crum

Crum started her presentation by sharing this quote from 1943:

What if there is a natural progression from telescopes to airplanes to persistent recognition systems? With this new technology, combined with AI, we can continue to extend our scope. Crum asks us to imagine all the many powerful and transformative benefits these systems can provide.

Here are a few of the ways we can extend the scope of our senses:

Emotion – Devices that pick up our emotions might, for example, automatically play us soothing music in the car to prevent road rage; they might know when we’re grieving and eliminate the ads we see. If they know we’re having positive feelings, they could suggest ways to prolong or recreate them later. Or help us better interact more effectively with others.

Breath – Devices that track our breath can help us improve our state of mind. If we know that we’re not breathing well, we can consciously control it and calm ourselves to reduce stress. This will also improve our heart rate, blood pressure and circulation. Having this tool in our arsenal will help us feel better and lead healthier lives.

Gaze – Devices which know where we’re looking will know what we’re interested in. And they might give us an extra way to interact with content. Say you want to turn the television on, for example. Just stare at the tv screen, and voila! – who needs the remote control? Want to pick which youtube video to watch? No need for the mouse click: just linger your gaze a bit longer on ‘cat playing piano’ and you’ll be taken straight to the hilarity.

Inner Ear – A lot of data can be mined from inside our ears to help understand our internal states. And a lot can be done with persistent recognition systems and AI in our ears to help create personalized experiences for us in the context of our lives. Via tracking, these devices will learn from the environment for us in order to provide a tailored experience at the point of need. If your hearable recognizes from your internal state that the noise at a party is overwhelming you, it can alter the volume within your ears to help you have a better experience – or, isolate only the voices from the people you are conversing with. Crum envisions a future where people will embrace this empowering hearable tech:

“Like fashion eyewear, hearing aids may become a style choice.”

– Poppy Crum

Subvocal – Check out this conceptual video from MIT for a device that picks up your subtle internal subvocal movements in order to communicate with a computer. This is great for protecting our privacy when we may not want to use voice recognition in public.

Spaces – Once these systems are embedded throughout our physical environment, they may be able to communicate with one another and adjust the space itself for individual users. Imagine assisted living places where a smart room with persistent recognition could help folks perform regular tasks they may find difficult, such as automatically lowering or raising the blinds. Imagine an elevator which takes the data from a person with physical impairments and automatically selects the right button for them. This tech has the capacity to eliminate barriers to access, creating an adaptive environment for everyone – especially people with disabilities.

Memory – A device that tracks and stores data and is capable of reminding you of things has the potential to aid a lot of people. Those who live with memory loss issues reportedly love Alexa-style services. They can keep asking for what the day is twenty times a day and still get the correct answer each time, without judgement.

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Crum points out we can see these devices as extended partners, not assistants. The concept of one-size-fits-all technology, which is what we have now and have always had, will be a thing of the past. The next generation will wonder in amazement how we all had to use the same cookie-cutter tech.

Crum sees the future as the ‘era of the empath‘. If our technology can know how we’re feeling – measure our eye dilation, heat signatures, the amount of carbon dioxide in our breath – and determine from that data whether we’re lying, in love, feeling lousy, etc, then it means “we can bridge the emotional divide.” Crum predicts it’s the end of the poker face. “We get a chance to reach in and connect to the experience and sentiments that are fundamental to us as humans in our senses, emotionally and socially.” Examples she gives are a high school counselor being able to know whether a seemingly cheery student is actually having a hard time, or an artist able to find out exactly how her work effects people emotionally.

Another exciting possibility is in the field of healthcare and the potential of these systems to diagnose diseases. This technology can differentiate coughs and sneezes from other background noises so could discern if we’re ill and suggest solutions. If our speech patterns and body movements are being collected through persistent recognition, AI might use that data to determine whether we are developing early signs of diabetes, multiple sclerosis, bipolar disorder, or Parkinson’s, and warn us. Using real-world labeled 911 audio of cardiac arrests, researchers trained the AI in smart devices to accurately classify agonal breathing instances – an early warning sign of cardiac arrests. Thus, the AI on the other end of the 911 call (or even in the smart speaker in your house) might know you are having a heart attack before a human dispatcher does.

How do libraries fit in?

Libraries are well-positioned to educate their communities about this emerging technology. Some libraries have partnered with voice assistants to create apps within them for their patrons specifically for using the library’s services. Others are teaching classes on how to set them up, or publishing helpful FAQs.

Library staff should be aware of the potential of persistent recognition systems, both good and bad. There are the very serious privacy and security concerns to keep up with and inform patrons about. And there are the beneficial uses that Crum envisions. Libraries are all about the idea of recognizing the importance of personalization and inclusive services. We seek to best understand and meet the needs of unique user experiences. It is inevitable that our communities will soon be joined by these AI partners with the capability to radically transform their lives, hopefully for the better. Let’s work to ensure this technology reduces barriers to access and helps us better connect with each other, enabling and empowering us to lead healthier, happier lives.