美国国家公共电台 NPR CES 2020 Brings Toilet Paper Delivery Robots And Hopes For 5G（在线收听）

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Now let's go to the land of flying cars and trash cans that change their own bags. That is Las Vegas this week. About 200,000 people are meeting there for the annual extravaganza known as the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. One of those people is NPR technology correspondent Shannon Bond.

SHANNON BOND, BYLINE: The first robot I meet at CES does just one thing, but it might come in handy.

GREGG WEAVER: So you're on the commode. You look over. Oh, no. Somebody didn't change a roll. Hello? Nobody home.

BOND: That's Gregg Weaver of Procter & Gamble describing the Charmin Roll Bot, as in roll of toilet paper.

WEAVER: You take out your smartphone. It's Bluetooth-activated. It finds you in your home, delivers a fresh roll of Charmin, saves the day.

BOND: Saves the day? That might sound a bit dramatic, but it could save you a few uncomfortable steps to retrieve a spare roll. You can't buy P&G's robot or a lot of the stuff here, but that's what much of CES is about - glimpsing the future of technology. Things like touch screens and voice assistants showed up here years before they became mainstream. The show is a dizzying display of tech in every form imaginable spread over almost 3 million square feet of exhibition space. I dodge rolling robots and people stumbling around, their eyes covered by virtual reality headsets.

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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Are you ready to be awestruck, to try experiences enhanced in ways you never imagined? Are you ready to build on what's next?

BOND: This year in Las Vegas, a lot of the buzz is about 5G. That's the next generation of much faster cellular networks. 5G is still in the early stages, but that's not dampening the excitement. Kevin Westcott is a vice chairman at consulting firm Deloitte. He says 5G is about more than downloading a movie really quickly.

KEVIN WESTCOTT: That's not going to change my life. What's going to change it is when people start envisioning new applications that use absolutely real-time data.

BOND: Think self-driving cars talking to each other and to the roads they're driving on. One company here at CES working on this is Valerann. The British-Israeli startup put sensors in roads. They detect traffic and weather and can light up in the road to direct the flow of cars around a vehicle that's had to pull over onto the shoulder. Shahar Bahiri is co-founder of Valerann. He says the company is already using 5G connections in some places.

SHAHAR BAHIRI: When you know that you have this stopped vehicle, when you know that you have black ice on the road, when you know when you will have a congestion and you can switch the traffic lights accordingly, your life is easier using data.

BOND: Many of the startups at this year's show are making health care apps and devices that bring the tools of the doctor's office to your smartphone. At another booth, a company called Binah uses an iPad's camera to read your vital signs by scanning your face. It looks for a tiny movement in the skin under the eye each time the heart beats. Mona Popilian, Binah's director of marketing, explains.

MONA POPILIAN: There's a change in the reflection of the light on your skin, and we say, OK, now there's been a heartbeat. And then there's another and another, and so we have the heart rate. And based on this, we continue to calculate the rest of the measurements, like oxygen, respiration rate, mental stress. And blood pressure we're going to have very soon.

BOND: Popilian says Binah's app can be used by doctors to remotely examine patients. A big Japanese insurance company is using it to monitor stress levels of drivers.

POPILIAN: So stand here, please, in front. I will just click here.

BOND: It takes a few seconds to deliver my results. The screen lights up. My heart rate and oxygen levels are normal, but after dodging robots and surrounded by flashing screens, unsurprisingly, I'm mildly stressed.

Shannon Bond, NPR News, Las Vegas.

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