For this particular Personal Massager, the selling point is its interface with the Handspring Visor, a competitor to Palm's own PDA. The Visor's familiar interface in theory gives the device more flexibility than what the company refers to as more "conventional" devices, allowing the user to program the device more easily than would otherwise be possible.
"I believe the great point about this is that it creates a new interface for people to get their voices, their thoughts and their worries into the police service, " said Dr Savage.
It would be another bit of sweet vindication for Xerox PARC, which was maligned for years as the lab that invented great stuff--the computer mouse, the point-and-click interface, Ethernet networking--but did little to let Xerox shareholders cash in on it.