During my tour of the north east last week I invited to have a look round Newcastle University’s Culture Lab. The Lab, housed in the plush surroundings of the old Grand Assembly Rooms, is

a unique research infrastructure providing an environment for academics and practitioners working beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries

that promotes

socially and economically valuable synergies with artists, creative industries, and cultural and scientific institutions, and the development of innovative research with digital tools.

In other words, it’s a big hall full of lots of people playing around with bits and pieces of kit, making interesting stuff.

The particular project I was there to see was the Ambient Kitchen. The Kitchen isn’t a single new technology, but a standard, traditional kitchen (it’s built into one corner of the Lab’s main hall) fitted out with widgets and gizmos designed to help people with dementia live a relatively normal culinary life.

To look at it, you’d have no idea. The Kitchen is an example of pervasive computing, and one of its key concepts is that everything should seem as normal as possible.

The technologies hidden under the surface allow the Kitchen to work with its users, rather than simply being a workspace and a passive collection of tools. All the boxes and jars in the cupboards are fitted with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, a bit like the ones you’ve probably found hidden in the pages of books you’ve bought from Waterstones.

The RFID allows the kitchen’s computer to detect when you take out certain items and offer you relevant help. So, for example, if you take a jar of Nescafe out of a cupboard, projectors built into the underside of the upper units will project information on to the white wall, listing the steps involved in making a cup of coffee. Apparently, one of the problems dementia sufferers experience is losing their place in a sequence of simple events, such as making a hot drink. Having the information automatically appear on the wall acts as a handy aide memoire.

(Yes, it seems that forgetting how to make a hot drink is a sign of dementia. I’m only 33, and I sometimes have trouble with the sequence of events involved in plugging in the kettle, let alone making the damn drink. Unfortunately the Ambient Kitchen is a long way from being on the market, so I’ve got another few years of drinking cold water with lumps of instant coffee floating in it.)

The Kitchen doesn’t just help you make a drink. If you’re not sure what to have for your lunch, it’ll scan the RFID data of everything you’ve got in stock and display a recipe that fits the available ingredients. It’ll track whether or not you’ve taken your medication, and flash up a warning if you forget.

The great thing about it is that it’s all so smooth. Nothing is clunky or mechanical. It doesn’t feature any of the brutal, utilitarian engineering you might associate with equipment designed for the disabled. It is, frankly, cool.

Watching it in action is a reminder that RFID isn’t necessarily a sinister, Big Brotherish technology, as quite a few recent media stories would have us believe.

The whole Culture Lab project seems very worthwhile. It woke up my inner, 10-year-old engineer - the kid I wrote about the other day, who used to love playing around with his Meccano and his 32k Acorn Electron, before badly-taught secondary school science killed off the desire to take the interest further.

If you’re an investor with a few million quid to spare and you’d like to make the developers of the Ambient Kitchen rich, you probably need to contact Patrick Olivier. The Kitchen’s dedicated site, which includes more information on the technology, can be found here.

Technorati Tags: RFID, Ambient Kitchen, Pervasive Computing