LAUSR

Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “this world is a global village”. The whole world has indeed shrunk through technological advancements and intercontinental technology transfers. However, the nations are still bound together only through humanness amidst diversity and not merely through technological exchanges. We found that most of the prevailing technologies come with an inherent challenge that is tradeoff between cost and affordability. For example, a recent study by World Bank and World Health Organization on expenditure towards healthcare, education and other essentials shows an alarmingly increasing rate on expenditure thereby making affordability to get access to such benefits a critical problem to solve in general. These are also the fields where maximum technological advancements are happening today. Our paper focuses predominantly on this tradeoff especially those challenges faced by senior citizens, super senior citizens, economically marginalized sect of people and differently abled. Our work also looks at the means on how technologies could assist them to live independently and get access to some of the emerging technologies without actually knowing the intricacies. Our purpose is also to bring technology that is affordable, implementable at lower cost and that delivers higher efficiency with maximized reach in society. We hence chose this study of adoption of emerging and open source technologies such as semantics and their indispensable role in serving the society.