LAMA to Deliver Public Announcements on Mobile Phones
Published: Jun 28, 2007
A group of research students at the IBM’s laboratory at Hursley in Hampshire has developed LAMA (Location Aware Messaging for Accessibility), a system capable of delivering public announcements to people on a mobile phone. This system was initially created to improve communications for people with hearing disability.
Its designers expect it to be operational soon in busy public places like airports, railway stations and hospitals. The mobile phone will recognize, when its user enters a place where the LAMA system is running, and then display a list of the services on offer. Public address announcements will be delivered to the user’s handset in their chosen format, once they sign up for the service.
A profoundly deaf IBM employee was the inspiration behind LAMA, who was concerned about hearing the fire alarm at the same time as his colleagues.
IBM’s master inventor, Andy Stanford-Clark said, “He said if we could wire up the computer to the fire system and send a message through the IBM messaging system to his phone he could be alerted that way.” Four research students were then given this idea as part of the company’s Extreme Blue research program.
Though this system was originally designed to help people with hearing disability, people with other types of disabilities and the population as a whole can also benefit from it. Messages can be delivered in audio form to people with visual disability.
IBM expects the pilots to begin before the end of this year, and also notified about a train company’s interest in LAMA.
Source: BBC News, Technology (UK)
