Now, Big Brother - and his wife - are watching you
Mobile app allows the tech-savvy in the family to set up a social-media TV channel so elderly can keep up with relatives at flick of a switch
In families where the children "like" each others' Facebook photographs, follow multitudes of friends on Twitter and immerse themselves in various other social media, a parent can feel left out.
"I bought her an iPad three years ago, the latest version that came with both Wi-fi and 3G functions," said the 33-year-old chief executive of IT startup Medisen. "She wasn't that interested in using it. She preferred a television set to a tablet."
That got him thinking about the amount of work needed to bridge the generation gap in technology.
The solution he came up with was a custom-made television channel enabling exchanges between elderly parents and their children.
The channel is created using a mobile application. The more tech-savvy relations can use the app to select photos and videos as well as other content to play at a particular time.
"It is similar to uploading photos onto social media platforms, the only difference being the shared content appears on a TV screen," Wong explained.
To do this, a special set-top box needs to be connected to the TV. The only thing the parents have to do is switch on the set and use its remote control to select the channel. The product will be launched onto the market by the end of this year.
The project won a gold medal in the electronics division at the International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva, an annual competition which this year had 726 entries from 45 countries.
The second generation of the product will include a face-detection function which allows the set-top box to note images or videos which trigger responses from the viewer. It can be used to help work out what best to post on the television channel, but it also has the potential to help medical research by examining which images or colours dementia patients best respond to.
After Wong graduated from Chinese University's computer engineering programme, he spent a decade working at a company focusing on consumer electronics based in the Science Park. Last year, he moved on to head its spinoff firm, focusing on solutions for health and elderly issues. Medisen is part of the park's "incubation" programme - the first year is rent-free, and there is a 50 per cent discount for the following two years.
The elderly market is growing in Hong Kong and worldwide as populations around the world are rapidly ageing. Wong said he believed his products would prove just as useful in different cultures.
"In the United States, parents and children live far away from each other, maybe in different states. In Hong Kong, parents seldom get to see their children even when they live nearby because of long working days. Both are in need of communications solutions."
For QBS System, another start-up in the park, the focus is the relationship between people and the environment. Using radio-frequency identification technology, the company has developed applications that help people find their way in places such as shopping malls.
"Using a mobile phone app, games or information can be unlocked when a person reaches a certain location," engineering director Dennis Kwan Ping-yuen said. "It can be applied at exhibitions or in shopping malls. Users can find the route to toilets and shops, while companies can identify where the most-visited locations are and how long attendants stay."
The application will be launched this month.
While the government is reviving plans to set up an information technology bureau to boost the sector, Kwan said small companies were always faced with the problem of finding a base and people to hire in the face of soaring costs.
Local students, he said, were hesitant about studying IT as they believe it is not a well-paid career or they are unsure of the job prospects. The result was a continual manpower shortage, said Kwan.
