That way a web service does all the thinking and you can easily program it on behalf of your aging grandparents from your own home. If one of their friends moves or dies, you can keep them from making embarrassing mistakes and reduce the potential aggravation that they may have (which would limit their willingness to use the system).

Like mentioned above, retraining them to not pick up until the phone rings and to be patient for the ring after might be the hardest part of the entire thing. If you could rig up a phone to anounce “dialing” when ever Google Voice calls and automatically turn on a speakerphone instead, that might be a good step to improving usability.

That said, this is a really great idea.

This is Stephen. I actually worked up the circuit that does all these things. The next version will use dtmf, so it should work on any touch tone phone.

1) make the device to dial native (with out that extra phone service.)

2) use the current pattern method for dialing; pick up phone, scan rfid, rfid thing dials the scanned number, success!

3) ship it with 3 generic looking “police” “fire” “poison control” tags which the setup person can program to the local numbers.

4) needs a simple programing interface and card index.

5) maybe needs some kind of security to avoid malicious re-programing?

Re-design of concept idea:
Eliminate the rfid and make a video screen with pictures that can be taken with a small digital camera on the device that could take photos of anything the person holds up, up/down arrows and an enter button to select, an add button with numbers to go with it; like a very simplified cell phone stored number directory with bigger buttons and bigger photos. It might just need a flash card to operate/store the information, maybe a backup that is only accessed when a number is added/updated. Different, but not all better.

RFID seems like a better solution than image/face recognition, just because it’s easier to use and less finicky – a requirement for things like this.

You should market it.

It’s almost like the markets for the elderly, the one-armed, the no-armed, the blind etc are just too small for anyone truly innovative (other than Ben Heck) to jump in and do something great for these people.

And their world really -is- way less accessible than the world those of us lucky enough to be fully able live in. Anyone want to start an LLC that specializes in think-tanking for these tasks? :P

Thanks in advance!