« Instructions (and Pictures) on How to Disassemble a Microsoft Mouse | Main | The Inside: the fluttering flag over the fence »
June 28, 2005
My Cousin Alex (Might Have) Designed the MRI Machines in House
Apparently my Aunt has started a little e-mail campaign to get extended family members to vote for my cousin Alex (who I've not seen in years), who helped design this display. It's all part of this Design Awards thing, where they're having a people's choice award - having actually already given out all the awards that are worth a damn (my cousin's got a gold award). My cousin's team's contribution is the Ambient Experience for Healthcare - the idea of which is actually quite wonderful.
What it is (from what I understand) is an effort to make the experience of an MRI machine less intimidating. As anyone who's watched any medical drama (House in particular), MRIs can be very stressful - leading to a great deal of claustrophobia and stress at the very loud noises and enclosed spaces that accompany it. Ambient environments would then have a genuine medical application, from what I understand, since people who are more relaxed will tend to move less - and the less movement there is, the more accurate the scan will be. Which is good too for the patient, not having to go through the experience again to get a proper scan.
But yes, I always point out (rather silly-ly) that it's a Philips MRI machine in House (well, most of House season 1 anyway). That's the wages. So while it's probably unlikely that my cousin had that much to do with the machine itself (or not, whatever), the display here seems like a worthy enough thing to vote for. Certainly better than Apple Fanboy-ware (who would have thought, eh?) - the Smack-Mini and the iPod-Snuff-Film.
Despite the fact that I really quite like both the idea and the implementation, I can't begin to describe what must the immense amount of vote rigging that must be going on for their display to currently be in the lead - to a comical extent. Once you've voted (for him of course), you'll see that they are currently leading at 57% of the vote in what is really a very crowded field. And I mean I have no particular compunctions on the rigging of votes in this case - if it can be rigged, whose fault is that; just as long as the fuckers from Apple don't get it.
Notice though, that in the Environments category, my cousin's team got Gold to Team America: World Police's Silver.
Posted by subtitles at June 28, 2005 10:47 PM | Personal