A concept exploring the future of human-centered technology for businesses, this is Project Palomar
The Problem:
Corporations, Enterprises, Warehouses, Mom and Pop shops always have this constant juggle of keeping all employees productive.
Time is not directly money, however there is overlap between time and money — which is called efficiency. Inefficiency can cost a company a lot of time, and burn a lot of money, especially when new information or procedures is involved. Another expensive factor is new employees with training, which then falls back on seniority and tenured employees to maintain the store more than newer employees.
Efficient workers can save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars to potentially millions. When you expedite the training process, take away the “stop and ask someone” on the job, and can subconsciously keep everyone on the same page, it creates a coherent environment which also empowers the company to focus on innovating instead of watching over employees.
The Palomar is a small, screen-less handheld made for the people who help revolutionize, operate, and maintain your business. With the knowledge of a tenured worker, it has a deep knowledge of company operations, procedures, policies.
The Inspiration
The Palomar takes inspiration from the simplicity and form factor of pagers, but with a voice-first approach. The first sketch reveals volume buttons on the left side, a talk button on the right, a mini LCD screen to display minimal information, a USB-C port, headphone jack on the top, and a power slider alongside with this. This design has then altered and shifted as time progressed.
The prototype OS’ foundation was explored alongside all sorts of preexisting operating systems, such as DietPi for its lack of a real GUI and ASCII-first approach. Secondly, The hardware tested was a Raspberry Pi 5 due to its modularity and ease of tweaking. The AI model is a 1.1b parameter model, however it was tweaked for the ability to seamlessly “educate” the device with newer information and allow the model to adapt, and adjust its knowledge accordingly.
This device is ambient and doesn’t intrude with the task at hand. It takes the shape of a pager; pocket sized and light. Whenever an immediate question is required, Palomar can provide simple and fast responses to remove friction from job tasks.
“I believe that AI has, and currently is a controversial point in human society” Deontae stated. “We’ve been anticipating this type of technology to get here and take over everything the human does. It’s here but it’s fallen in the double edge sword tragedy. Ultimately, it’s nothing more than being an extension of human – a greater one for that matter. There’s so much more that it can do that I’m confident that a product like this is inevitable in all job sectors.”
Looking beyond…
The extension to update, teach, or shift knowledge is still a big talking point as the objective is to make this a seamless and secure approach. With the Palomar, privacy is at its core. Direct connection stumps bluetooth as a secure way to shuffle and transfer data. Wired connection requires physical connection to transfer data over bluetooth which uses RF for data transfer, which also has less points of potential failure.
The software and hardware to update new information without compromising older data is the more important second piece of the puzzle and is still under development and research. It’s is codenamed, project “Uni-server.” Uni-server and Palomar.
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