The Need for Change
Martyn Gilbert
UK 3.0
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. This is not the right title: The need for change. I apologise for that. The understanding which I'm going to be setting out for you today is based on three sets of experiences which I've had. One is from the Mon Ami project, which is one of Europe's largest e-inclusion projects. The primary aim and its acronym is one of those things that they thought of it first and then tried to work out what the project was ‑‑ I'm sure you're familiar with the experience.
Mainstreaming on ambience intelligence is enabling people who are older or disabled to have the same benefits from the connected world as those who don't have any restrictions.
Open Hub is the company, of which I'm the chairman. So I declare my interest. That sells smart home infrastructure. The idea being that whatever you want to do the sensors in the home are coordinated centrally and you can make them do anything. UK 3.0. An ambitious undertaking to save the country billions and make the country billions each year. By exploiting smart homes technologies on an open basis, taking services, appliances from whoever and wherever, especially small to medium enterprises which have something that is gold for just a handful of people but there's no economic way of getting it out there to those who need it, but having an overall infrastructure into which they can place it, satisfies niche needs.
But the idea is that by doing this and having a nationwide infrastructure, it becomes possible to save vast amounts of money through avoiding replication. So the important question: For what purpose do we even justify this gathering? Why are we here? What is the point?
I offer you this one single underlying raison d'etre. An individual's happiness. It's not about the markets or the national economy. The whole reason is to enhance an individual's happiness. At least their contentedness with their life.
So because it's about individuals, it isn't about categories of people. It's about individuals. So what is it that matters?
The priorities of these will differ from one person to another, whether it's dignity, whether it's independence, but the one that gets so often missed off, social participation. It's about being part of society. Not isolated. Terribly important. That is from an individual standpoint.
But then what about everyone else? In the pursuit of providing for an individual's happiness, lots of other people get involved. Each and every one of these will argue that they are the prime mover in that individual's sense of wellbeing. Everyone knows best for everyone else.
So you find huge amounts of advocacy for each and every one of these participants. It's all well intended, but all usually very, very insular. So let's look at what is really happening. Those who care, and I use this in the broadest expression, no one has some patent rights on caring. We all care, one way or another. Those who care for the environment within which the ones we care for live. So here is an individual. All of the stakeholders around here one way or another are caring and trying to enhance that individual's happiness.
However, the individual, whether older, disabled, or in fact anyone, only feels the benefit of that care if it affects their lives in a positive way. We could have meetings like this endlessly and talk about what needs to be done, but if we don't actually do it, it's largely worthless.
So it's all about coupling. It's all about making sure that that person in the middle is actually receiving the benefits of that care. By coupling, I mean in a very physical way.
When I said that is all of those stakeholders around there are part of the environment of that individual, it's easy to be vacuous about the definition of "environment" so I'm going to define it. One's environment is the physical objects and individuals with whom one has an interaction, any interaction. That requires some coupling, some exchange of energy. Otherwise you do not know that anything has happened.
The thing is a lot of people for whom their mobility is in some way compromised spend a lot of time at home. So all of those stakeholders who provide the care have to provide that care in the home, one way or another. Whether it's a social worker visiting, in which case the house provides access to the person through a front door. Or whether it's friends and neighbours phoning up to make sure that somebody is okay, in which case it's wires going through the house. One way or another, it's about coupling, from the individual, and if the individual feels that care but is not overwhelmed by it, then hopefully this is going to contribute to that happiness.
The problem, however, is that an individual's home is the immediate environment. In order to provide the services that go through the home, it requires certain technologies to be brought to bear. Whether that technology is quite simply walking around and knocking on that person's front door, or having the usual assisted living or telecare type of stuff, technology is at play, one way or another.
I'm sure it doesn't come as a shock to anyone in this room to know we do not live in an ideal society. In order to provide the care levels and to facilitate independence and to facilitate self‑esteem and dignity of all of those things they haven't been delivered yet or we would not be here and there would be no cause to talk about it, so we need to do something and that requires the use of resources, but, as Peter just pointed out, and as I'm sure we're all very well aware, resources are finite and shaky. The problem, the huge problem, is ego and ambition come first.
I note that pretty much ‑‑ well, 80 per cent of the people in this room, come from the from the vendors community. However, everything I talked about is about the carer community. That is not to say that vendors do not care but there are two sets of agendas. Those who do the caring have their own lives and often there's an expectation if you really care you'll completely sacrifice your life for others. That is not sustainable.
Then possibly the biggest problem of the lot is the tyranny of best practice. If ever there was an abused notion, it's this one. Best? Is it really?
Does this mean that what has been achieved to date is the best that humanity can muster? The reality is that in a society characterised by litigation, evidence based everything is really just a euphemism for saying copying what others have done that has not resulted in vast legal fees. It's true.
Best practice, utterly and fundamentally is about recipes that work for categories of people. By definition if you take an individual and consider yourselves each of you now just yourself and your own needs, would you say that society delivers everything that you personally need and that you consider essential to your happiness? Maybe one or two of you, wow, I'm deeply envious if you have it, but I'm sure most of us have not. We all have unique needs and desires and aspirations and best practice talks about categories of people. So if you don't fit into a category for the policies and procedures, tough. If we followed best practice, there would not have been a man on the moon because no one could cite an evidence base that it would work.
So we need to apply some common sense.
For this, as they say, I take as my text the aphorism of all aphorisms, which rings in my ears every day because it's such good advice: Our chairman once told me what is good design for the elderly and disabled is good design for us all. That is a resounding truth. Very often technological designs are not good because they were got out driven by business imperatives and not by actually working out what ‑‑ the way it should really work. Hands up who remembers last programming a VHS tape recorder when they were around? They were pointless and most people just ended up using the rental CD ‑‑ sorry, the VHS tape. So we turn to the contribution of the smart home can make. It must satisfy the needs of the individual. It must facilitate the activities of carers, especially friends, family and neighbours.
This is not about home automation, which very often the smart home is taken as being synonymous with. It's about connecting the individual with those who constitute his or her environment.
It's about equipping homes to provide the environment when other people cannot, or the individual chooses a more self‑reliant route.
It's not just about smart, but active. I'm fond of pointing out what we're on the verge of, if we have the guts to do it, is revolution in housing. Not just new housing. Because the RIBA rules are 70 per cent of the housing needed is standing today. So retrofit is crucially important, but we're talking about a transition in the automotive industry 15 or 20 years ago. You cannot get a car which satisfies customer requirements. For those who buy cars, you cannot get cars that satisfy their needs and the regulatory requirements without having a whole load of electronics. Cars are intelligent. A hybrid of the mechanical and electronic. We're not longer able to build cars that did what we wanted 15 or 20 years ago as pure mechanical entities. So it's for the house. It's very tempting and people are in denial that all we need is to build houses with this material or that material. No. In the same way as for most of you your cars have at least five or ten computers in them but you don't know they're there and they just do what they do, steering wheel and you're away. So it should be for the genuinely useful smart home. That you don't know it's there, but what it is doing is enabling that home to be a better place to live. So it's active, not merely passive.
All of these things are activities, whether it's air quality, energy management, virtual wardens. Whether it's transport, or shopping. Your home, if you're obliged to spend a lot of time, has these activities, but then to flip it around. Not just active, but smart. It should know when you need help and alert professionals. But then, to flip it round not just active but smart. It should know when you need help and alert professionals. When things go horribly horribly wrong, I term it ‘culpability’ your home is a place you must be able to trust. This is not just for older and disabled people, it is for all of us.
Then, not just smart but reliable, private and secure. It is very easy and people talk in the most vague and abstract terms about the smart home. Well, if you can hack it, if you can turn on someone's lights for a kid up the street, it is just not doing happen, is it? However, reasons to be cheerful. The technology is here today in fact it has been for about five years but if anyone says oh we need to develop this stuff, it has been around it has been around a long time.
So most of it by definition is mature. Sure, some of the bricks have not been put together, they exist it one place but now they are being connected together. So hooray for best practice, it is mature, you’re not doing experiments with people's lives. Crucially, picking up on Peter's themes, moving information rather than people saves money and energy, moving physical mass, that's what we spend a lot of fossil fuel on. If we are able to provide better services by moving information, rather than people, we will save substantial amounts of energy and that's where we get the coalescing of the smart home and energy if it is so great why don't we already have it? Why isn't it in every home already? This is the need for change. The next slide is the absolute sense of why it is not there at the moment. It is that. I can't tell you how many meetings I have been in in which there's always a big dog on the block. Very often that big dog on the block often from the public sector, knowing the public sector has money to spend and will sit back and say 'well, sell this to me, sell it'. I have said so often 'what do you want to achieve? What are the outcomes you want?' It is not a very pleasant experience because all the time you know that the people who need to benefit from it, specially older and disabled people, are on the outside of these conversations and expect those who are in a position to be able to do something about it will behave responsible. It rarely happens. So also not just the public sector, the private sector, big dog on the block happens time and time again because often you find dominant market players with a particular cash cow and they will tell the market this is what it is, what you should be using. It is all about getting money out of the system.
I am sure that everybody in this room is well aware that the old behaviours cannot stay as they were. It has to change. To use the expression the piggy bank is empty, we have to do things differently and that means collaborating. It means collaborating within the private sector so those people who have the competencies will come together constructively, within the public sector to say what it needs to do and not just to be looking for best practice because if we do that we'll just do trials and pilots of stuff that's already around fee need to be putting the stuff together. It needs active collaboration between public and private sector to come together and design the systems, the technologies are there. All we have to do are say what are the services we want to provide? That's it. It doesn't take vast amounts of consultants who one way or another get huge amounts of money out of the system to tell you that which is obvious.
So to make it happen, people have to stand up and be counted and again I pick up on Peter's comment: it requires people to come together to act in concert and I was speaking to someone over coffee and even competitors can do this, because there is a huge market. It is not just this country either, it is the whole of Europe, to supply the kind of services which I have showed on the circular diagrams, everyone's needs all of these things. It is not just older and disabled people and to pick up on John's recommendation, what is good design for older and disabled people is good design for everybody. Get it right and the market isn't just a portion of society, it is all of it. Within the UK 3.0 projects, that's what we are doing. This is how we are setting at to save the country large sums of money and make new businesses happen and to make all of these services that I have talked about happen by bringing people together. Not just talking about it but actually doing it, competitors collaborating with each other to get stuff out there to the people who need.
I will finish now with a question to everyone here: if you have a choice to collaborate on a project that would bring all of the virtues which I have discussed and the virtues that you yourself want to see out there in society in people's homes delivering the benefits, if you could choose between collaborating with others or not doing so because you want to be paid for it first, before collaborating, which would you choose? The answer to that tells you the pace at which the advantages of the smart home will happen in society at large.