it’s unix, not eunuchs

Apparently Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire won an award called the NHS Live Award  for coming up with a system to help Bipolar patients manage their own conditions.  The system sends messages to the patients asking them how they’re feeling and the patients respond with pre-arranged answers.  It’s a pretty cool use of text messaging.

I’m not really sure why text messaging isn’t being used for more things, like:

• Letting you know when your table is ready at a restaurant
• Remind forgetful patients to take their medicine or dress their wounds
• Notifying you that Wal-mart is done changing your oil
• Playing cards with other users

Here’s the article about the British Mental Health Texting system.

Well, I haven’t texted any of my friends in my sleep yet. But I have woken up and silenced alarms on my phone when I wasn’t on-call. I have to change my ringers when I’m on-call just to make sure those sorts of things don’t happen to me.

But I was surprised today to find out that some people are now texting in their sleep. I remember way back in the day when I’d be in chat rooms and almost falling asleep on the keyboard. Or one time when I helped a friend move their business overnight I stopped being able to speak very intelligbly, so I told her I had to nap and got back at it in a few hours.

And I shouldn’t be surprised that Marketing Campaign Managers are now coming with the capability to send voicemails and text messages. Soundbite just announced their intent to launch their Intelligent Communications Platform in 3Q 2008 and it is supposed to help Fortune 1000 companies market to their customers via email, voicemail and text messages. I am a little interested in how the product is planning on plugging into the SMS channels of various Voice Networks. The only reliable way would be to come in as partner through a firewall and plug directly into the systems. They could attempt to work it via SMTP but the system would rapidly be shut down by anti-spam systems.

And finally, who could be surprised that eventually someone sued Mobile Carriers for not providing an option to opt out of text messaging and then charging customers if they still get texts even if they’re unwanted.

I’ve got Ringxiety: Link to NYTimes Article

It’s pretty funny because I’ve literally been a bit bemused lately with thoughts of “am I working so much that my brain is turning to mush?” Apparently it’s yet another health risk/annoyance of mobile phones. I even have the phantom vibrations thing going on that is described in the last two paragraphs on page two although I don’t have the lump the guy describes. Give me time and I’ll have a huge right quad!

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,64579,00.html