Residentiality

Last night (at time of writing) I was treated to a personal guided tour of the Steve Saling ALS Residence in Chelsea, MA. My tour guide, via laptop webcam, was my friend Lisa Jones-Wyhlidko, the dynamo who does such excellent volunteer work for ALS Guardian Angels. She dialed me up using Google Hangout (up to 9 people in a group teleconference - a really wonderful free tool!) and said she was going to walk me around and show off the Residence.

Rescuebook

Technology is extraordinary. The level of communication made possible today by technology is unprecedented. This ability is also available for people with extreme disability (I wrote this purely with eye movement to distribute to the world...).

Response-able

I was recently alerted to a blog called Science-Based Medicine which had a post that was rather critical of me. The post was written by David Gorski, a managing editor of Science-Based Medicine. If you read the post, you can probably understand why I took a little umbrage to Dr. Gorski's characterization of my efforts. Below is my response to him, shared here for my readers' convenience.

G-Whiz

Holy dancing cow! Today I was playing with my Google account and finally set up a G-Mail account. I then noticed a "Call Phone" link that connected me to Google Voice. While this isn't new by any means, since it was free for USA domestic and Canada, I decided to install the web browser add-on. Within a few minutes I was placing phone calls to friends. Imagine their surprise... The default setup comes across as "CLIENT_ONLY" which might be ignored by people with Caller-ID (most of my calls went to voicemail at first). So a few more minutes later I had "upgraded" my Google Voice account with a brand new mobile phone number in my desired area-code and linked it to my house land-line so people can call me if I am offline. Calls to my Google Voice number which go to voicemail are placed in an inbox I can access via my Google Voice or email. The voice quality on both ends was reported to be quite good. Calls were very easy for me to make. I cued up my opening lines so that as soon as the remote end answered I could hit "Speak" on my assisted communication device and identify myself. I had originally intended to use this in emergencies if I couldn't otherwise alert a caregiver (note that this is NOT suitable for dialing 9-1-1) but after my test calls went so well I decided that I have a "new" communication method for talking to my more patient friends. I had used Skype in the past, but Skype is only free for computer-to-computer calls, not to regular cell or land-line phones. I was able to do all of this with my eye-tracking system with relative ease. If you have control over your eye-tracking assisted communication device and can install software, I recommend trying this out to see if it works for you. UPDATE: Configuration instructions are in the Comments section.