Listen with Grandma: oral history that's both high tech/high touch

Jennifer Smith at the MIT Media Lab invents a rocking chair that's made for oral history.

In Smith's system, the elderly person sits on a rocking chair in front of a large screen displaying a life-size, graphic image of a little girl. She tells a story of her own and then asks the person in the rocking chair questions about their life.

In tests, Smith noticed that people's rocking patterns tended to change when they finished a story: "Some people come to a stop, while others speed up," she says. So an accelerometer on the back of the rocking chair monitors movement, feeding information back to a computer that controls what the little girl says and when she says it.