The smart spoon is a fantastic idea, on a number of levels. To
be fair, Google didn’t come up with it; the original “smart
spoon” actually debuted more than a year ago, designed by a startup
named Lift Labs — one of those names that just screams that the company
was designed from the ground up for sale to a larger corporation.
Regardless, Google saw the technology’s promise, and this week announced
that it has bought the company and its LiftWare spoon, a surprisingly
sophisticated piece of table-tech that steadies itself even in a
violently shaking hand. The smart spoon could improve the lives of
millions of people dealing with Parkinson’s and similar illnesses, but
it should also pay dividends for Google’s many other ambitious projects.
Google’s new spoon
is technically called a “tremor-canceling” invention, which means that
it reads incoming movement and uses onboard motors to offset that
movement and keep the bowl of the spoon as stationary as possible. It
has to do more than just mechanical shock-absorbing, as it
must dynamically undo the movement caused by random nerve firing, while
also identifying and not trying to offset the user’s attempts
to move the spoon toward the mouth. I can only imagine the frustration a
person must feel when having such trouble merely eating cereal, and
conceptually simple innovations like this are a great use of Google’s
seemingly unlimited acquisitions budget.
Still, it’s the technology itself that makes this a brilliant
purchase. Google has spent the past several years gearing up for a real
push into home robotics, and robotics in general, and they’ve managed to
pick up a full-featured, well tested stability technology that could be
vitally important. Google hasn’t announced any figures for the
purchase, but whatever they paid it’s likely too little; stabilizing
tech could help speed or improve finicky hand assembly in factories,
while many surgeons would certainly welcome the chance to cancel any
tiny, involuntary swaying of the hand. Active stability tech has been
around for some time, but it tends to be expensive and complex; LiftWare
has a complimentary hardware-software system that gets the job done
well, out of the box, in an easily generalizable package.
New versions incorporate a thoroughly modern, Kindle-esque industrial design.
We humans do some basic dynamic stabilization ourselves — this is why
you can drink a drink while walking. We unconsciously flex or relax
muscles in the back, shoulder, and arm to compensate for movement
propagating up through the hips — but robots have trouble doing this
effectively. The technology behind LiftWare could end up helping a robot
carry a dozen eggs home from the grocery store, or even underpin tech
letting a crane stay stable during an earthquake. Google has filed the
new acquisition under its GoogleX brand, which is also working things
like blood glucose-monitoring contact lenses and medical nanobots; you
can bet they are dreaming bigger than the G-Spoon, and plan to apply the
new technology widely.
Even if it is only restricted to tremor-canceling tech for people
with nerve problems, though, this is exactly what we should be seeing
from a company that’s struggling to stay true to the dictum, “Don’t be
evil.” Both strategically and ethically, Google’s done very well this
week.
Tags: Google, google x, liftlabs, liftware, object stabilization, robotics, robots
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