PC for personal care

But this is an imperfect solution, because elderly people on their own are inconsiderate enough to pop off without due warning. Grandpa is often found long after the event, stretched out on the kitchen floor with the neighbourhood cat dining off his hams.

To save the elderly in the UK from becoming cat food and their children from embarrassment, British Telecom is launching a new service that will continuously monitor them in their homes. Thesystem is the reverse of a burglar alarm.

It looks out for movement and body heat. When it stops getting a signal, it connects to a central computer, which makes a phone call to the house. If no one answers, the computer alerts a health worker. Interestingly, it also tracks other signs of life: for instance, the number of times the refrigerator door is opened every day.

It8217;s easy enough to extend the principle. You could root about in supermarket databases to see whether the old man is actually buying food or doing a Mother Hubbard. Thereafter, you could get seriously intrusive. You could pick up his debit card record. You could work out if he8217;s keeping himself busy. You could, with a little persistence, destroy the old man8217;s peaceful retirement.

In a way, digital communications is making possible the nightmare of early science fiction 8212; that machines may eventually rule our lives. It has created systems which monitor us and over which we have little or no control. The earliest instance was the smokealarm, the unsleeping foe of people who light up secretively in airplane toilets and their brethren in addiction who burn their toast on hungover mornings.

Recent advances in medicine have made it possible for doctors to monitor cardiac patients over the phone. And in heavily mechanised nations, social security and citizen identification numbers allow paranoid governments to track almost all activities of a citizen.

This invasion of privacy is tolerated because there8217;s a tradeoff 8212; the monitoring system also looks after your best interests. But it could soon have bizarre consequences. Today, paraplegics are getting integrated circuit implants that rewire lost connections between brain and muscle, allowing them to move their limbs. The next logical step is to implant a brain chip that can download your e-mail right into your sinuses over an infrared link.

US manufacturers are toying with the idea of the intelligent refrigerator, which will track your family8217;s usage of food, order anything that is likelyto run out over the Internet and pontificate at length on your lousy nutrition habits every time you reach for the butter dish. Neither development bodes well for individual freedom.

Two more frightening facts: these days, people make their choices almost entirely on the basis of advertising, and very often the choice is thrust upon them by the tendency of mass-market society to standardise everything. Everybody uses Microsoft products because Bill Gates is a particularly insistent advocate, and also because everyone else uses his gear.

Extend the argument and it8217;s easy to understand why millions of people may soon have their hooters clogged with unread e-mail. Much of which, one suspects, will come from providers of PCs, free software, underwear, baby foods, frozen desserts, cheap airline tickets, remaindered books and cut-price Hummers. Compared to that, dealing with Grandpa8217;s drool will be a piece of cake.