Adam Oliver loves stories with a social heart. As head of Corporate Social Responsibility and Age & Disability Research, BT Group Chief Technology Office, he gets to see several such stories unfold. The development of the BT Balance is one such tale.
The BT Balance is an adaptor that lets users navigate computer screens by slanting their computer left or right, up or down. For more on the technology behind the BT Balance go here.
“The idea of this was not to crack a market. The heart of the BT Balance is to help people,” Oliver says.
The reason they even looked at the project was they were aware of the growth of accelerometers in the field.
“We see more devices that use accelerometers,” Oliver says, citing the Wii as one of the units that came to their attention. But the BT Balance, while it could be used to enable games, is not targeted at that market.
They also were quite aware of the disk-parking feature in Apple computers. The unit uses an accelerometer to shut off the laptop if it is dropped or the angle of repose of the drive is suddenly changed. This prevents damage to the drive. And, in fact, the Apple concept was one of the intellectual forebears of the BT Balance.
The unit comes out of research done by BT’s Age and Disability Unit. But it was born in a “for fun” project that Dave Chatting, researcher in the Broadband Applications Research Centre, had set up on his own.
“I knew that my Mac would park the disk if I dropped it,” he says, noting that he gets a degree of flack from fellow researchers (especially PC fans) who want to “test it out” and see if they can mess up his computer. But the Mac’s system works fine.
To amuse himself and his fellow workers, Chatting put a puppet on his screen. The puppet moves on the laptop when the computer is moved around, and shows the disk parking function graphically.
The software behind the BT Balance is a direct result of his puppet experiment.
“I did it independently, as a fun thing to try,” Chatting recalls. He works out of the BT Technology Office at the company’s Adastral Park research labs near Ipswich, UK. When he was approached about the BT Balance, he knew just what to do.
“I took the things I learned and applied it to some practical applications,” he says. The BT Balance was proof of concept for the puppet demonstration.
Both the finished accelerometer and the MEMS in it are from Analog Devices.

But the project will not stop with the first unit. Oliver says they are working on other variations of the BT Balance.
The first generation of BT Balance is proving itself today in non-commercial applications. The company currently is developing future iterations of the unit, even though the first one probably will not hit the commercial market until late in 2008. No price has been set on the BT Balance.
“We are working with several charities and NGOs (non-government organizations) who are interested in how they can use the device,” Oliver says. BT’s initial announcement drew a number of organizations to the company’s research labs. This actually benefited BT, as well, since several of the people who played with the unit offered their ideas for new applications and uses.
While he acknowledges the unit could be used for gaming applications, it is clear that Oliver’s heart is set on seeing it used to aid the disabled or to enable specific field uses.
“The goal really is to supplement the keyboard with something that is a more natural way of working,” he says. “We are looking to give people a simple way to access applications.”