This accessibility tech promises to make it safer than ever to live independently (Photo: Reviewed.com) Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. Technology may be entertaining, but at its essence, its primary function is to make our lives easier. When we want to find answers to our questions, communicate with friends, secure our homes, or hundreds of other scenarios, we turn to technology. At CES 2020, technology took on another role: helping us care for ourselves and loved ones.

Technology may be entertaining, but at its essence, its primary function is to make our lives easier. When we want to find answers to our questions, communicate with friends, secure our homes, or hundreds of other scenarios, we turn to technology. At CES 2020, technology took on another role: helping us care for ourselves and loved ones. In an effort to make living with disabilities and aging in place as safe and independent as possible, companies are promising smart technology that allows you to better assess you or a loved one's health and environment. Linksys Wellness Pods use WiFi to track motion and respiratory changes.

Artificial intelligence applied to healthcare includes a collection of technologies that enable machines to sense, interpret, act and learn. AI implementations for digital health can be relatively simple when they are focused largely on personal patient engagement, or vastly complex when working with big data sets, highly specialized diagnostics, and the workflows of multiple highly complicated organizations. The addition of Internet of Things sensor data from connected health and related devices adds a new layer of critical, real-time contextual data. The uses cases for IoT sensor-informed healthcare applications can include home security and access control for vulnerable loved ones, remote patient monitoring of vitals, activity monitoring and anomaly detection, safety of the home and mobile environments, environmental monitoring for chronic conditions, and more. These use cases provide opportunities for the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform healthcare functions into data-driven services that can improve outcomes and deliver healthcare more efficiently.

The Robot Activity Support System, or RAS, uses sensors embedded in a WSU smart home to determine where its residents are, what they are doing and when they need assistance with daily activities. It navigates through rooms and around obstacles to find people on its own, provides video instructions on how to do simple tasks and can even lead its owner to objects like their medication or a snack in the kitchen. "RAS combines the convenience of a mobile robot with the activity detection technology of a WSU smart home to provide assistance in the moment, as the need for help is detected," said Bryan Minor, a postdoctoral researcher in the WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Minor works in the lab of Diane Cook, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the WSU Center for Advanced Studies in Adaptive Systems. For the last decade, Cook and Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, a WSU professor of psychology, have led CASAS researchers in the development of smart home technologies that could enable elderly adults with memory problems and other impairments to live independently.

While drones and driverless cars dominate the headlines, another breakthrough--robot dexterity--is likely to have an even greater impact in both business and everyday life. "Robot manipulation is the next shoe to drop," says Robert Platt, computer science professor and head of the Helping Hands robotics lab at Northeastern. "Imagine a robot that can do things with it's hands in the real world--anything from defusing a bomb to doing your laundry. This has been a dream in the research community for decades, but now we're finally getting to the point where it could actually happen." Recent advances in machine learning, Big Data, and robot perception have put us on the threshold of a quantum leap in the ability of robots to perform fine motor tasks and function in uncontrolled environments, says Platt.