Requirements Critic ("RC") is a joint project out of our Silicon Valley and Bangalore labs (time difference: An almost perfect 11.5 hours) that's looking for ways to aid the process of requirements development. Its current prototype is a Microsoft Word plug-in that acts sort of like a grammar checker–except it's checking the wording of your requirements documents for a range of common problems.

RC is part of a larger innovation agenda for Requirements Engineering that the Labs have developed in co-operation with the Global Delivery Excellence group. The broader vision is called "ACcenture Requirements Engineering Suite (ACRES)". The comprehensive suite that Labs is working toward will include a combination of commercial offerings and Labs-developed tools.

Philips has announced what you might call the "mood pen," a package of sensors (heart rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, finger pressure) built into a pen that collectively determine your emotional state and react accordingly. Ink color and tip shape can change during the course of a stroke; if you know how to read it, the line forms a record of the writer's changing state of soul. Philips says: "Signatures are currently always the same, yet some documents will be signed with enthusiasm, others possibly with hesitation. Having a recording of this could be useful for historical reasons."

Yes. Well. Certainly.

Revital Cohen, whom you might think of as an "artist," has developed a picture frame (which I guess makes it art) that displays real-time data from remote (say, in a hospital) life support machines. Putting the frame in your house would let you keep track of a loved one's condition.

So What?

MIT's Human Dynamics Lab is working on a form of social networking as old as humanity itself: Face-to-face introductions and subsequent chit-chat. Users wear badges that calculate how far apart people are standing (a good indicator of their reactions to one another, perhaps); record their conversation; and track their movements. In a large meeting with MIT corporate sponsors, the badges revealed a steadily more connected network (as people continued to meet each other throughout the day), with some vying for the title of "most connected" by trying to meet as many people as humanly possible.

So What?

Accenture Technology Labs' Enterprise Knowledge Retention (EKR) tool is an integrated suite of applications designed to ease the transfer of knowledge from worker to worker. It was originally designed for outsourcing engagements (where it's had great success under the name Rapid Transition Suite), but has recently been helpful in facilitating knowledge transfer for mergers & acquisitions as well as situations in which a workforce is heading rapidly for retirement. (There's also been discussion around using it to facilitate expansion into foreign markets.)

So What?

Aerotel has announced the GeoSkeeper, a Global Positioning System-enabled, wrist-mounted unit that alerts a call center when you press its panic button. The call center can also track your position and raise an alert when you leave predefined zones (such as your school). In addition to the GeoSkeeper (can you parse that name? I can't parse that name), Aerotel makes a variety of wireless medical monitoring devices suitable for "mobile patients." All of these products could, in theory, be combined to produce a comprehensive location/diagnostic "über-box."

So What?