Motorola Patents Cell Phones for the Elderly

Monday, May 08, 2006

Motorola has recognized that the elderly have very different requirements of a cell phone than the younger generation. Currently cell phones have advanced to fulfill the consumer demand of the younger generation which has resulted in cell phones with more and more gadgets and getting more and more compact. However we may now soon be seeing a Cell Phone for the elderly from Motorola.

Motorola have recently patented their elderly cell phone technology which also has technology to assist the hearing impaired. The way the technology works is quite novel, it automatically detects speech patterns of the elderly and adjusts incoming and outgoing audio to provide the optimum experience. Additionally a more simple menu structure and larger font size is used.

This technology will be built into regular Motorola cell phones and can actually detect if a person is elderly from the speech acoustics. Voice characteristics such as trembling, less energy and a lower speech rate are all used to recognize an elderly individual. It would be interesting to see if you could trick the technology by imitating the voice of an old person. Once an elderly person is detected the cell phone adjusts audio levels and the visual screen to an elderly optimum setting.

This technology could see Motorola pave their way ahead in to the elderly market segment which has currently being overlooked.