"Everybody's on the wrong side of the digital divide"

To Pentland, the roots of the digital divide-if you're reading this on-line-are right in front of you.

"The things we have on our desks are really very poorly tuned to people in human society," says Pentland. "So everybody's on the wrong side of the divide, some more so than others. The real challenge is to turn technology into something that's human-centered and friendly to everyone."

	It might look weird now, but taking technology off the desk and onto the street is part of Pentland's plan.

In the wearables lab at MIT, Pentland's student Rich DeVaul built the jacket Alan donned to help him remember the scientists' names, and Brain Clarkson's "turtle" records the work-a-day life of the graduate student. These devices may seem like the logical heirs to today's PDA's and cell phones, but the researchers considered much more than just memory capacity and battery life when designing their gadgets.

"It's how to get out of pager hell and stop being slaves to our cell phones," says Pentland. "We try to make technology more aware of human social networks and human communities."

Guided by this philosophy, Pentland's projects seek to improve technology everywhere-from its traditional corporate and academic settings, to the doctor's office and rural villages in developing nations.

At work or school, computers and electronics serve mainly as digital databases. But what if a conference room or classroom actually facilitated meetings, projects or presentations? Pentland and his proteges Sumit Basu, Tanzeem Choudhury and Brian Clarkson are working on a sensor-filled room that does just that, even anticipating human needs and preventing arguments.

This model house at the University of Rochester, uses sensors to monitor the health of study subjects.

While we've grown used to our physicians typing our complaints into an exam-room computer, most non-emergency health care is pretty low-tech. But Pentland, who co-founded the Center for Future Health at Rochester University in New York, hopes to change that.

In a five-room simulation of a house at the university's Medical Center, researchers use infrared sensors, computers and video cameras to monitor test subjects. The goal is to keep track of patients' day-to-day health so physicians might better treat them.

"These things will look like little pieces of jewelry basically," says Pentland. "But they're you're buddy, sitting on your shoulder, just watching out to see that nothing's going wrong. Are you behaving like you would normally behave? Or have you stopped eating, or are you sleeping poorly?"

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