Polio survivor envisions Web Smart homes for disabled people

From Peninsula Daily News:

PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. -- A photographer and polio survivor hopes to build a care facility that would allow him to remain independent.

Each of Port Townsend photographer Michael Bosold's 1,500-square-foot Web Smart Home units would have its own motherboard that would allow a resident to control the home's functions -- such as opening and closing doors, turning on and off lights and appliances and setting environmental conditions -- from a wheelchair or a car.

In developing the concept, Bosold (pictured) is racing against the pace of his own physical deterioration.

"This needs to get done because Mikey is going to need a place to live," he said, referring to himself.

"I'm 62 but have the body of an 80-year-old," said Bosold, whose right arm was crippled by polio when he was 4 years old.

"It's not getting any better and pretty soon I'm going to have to learn how to run a data base with my toes."

He feels the Web Smart Home would be useful for others. It could redefine elder care and provide an acceptable compromise between moving in with the kids and being stuck in a nursing home.

"I expect this will meet the needs of people who are aging and can't do everything for themselves," Bosold said.

"And it will be a smart home, so it will be able to anticipate many of your needs."

Bosold envisions a complex that would cost about $1.2 million to construct.

Four of the units he would sell for about $200,000.

One unit would be for himself. Bosold plans to live on the second story in a modern, accessible apartment of his own.

Bosold has his eye on a piece of land for the complex, he said this week, but he doesn't know how long it will take to accomplish his dream.

"Things always take longer than you plan for," he said. "But everything should be finished by 2015."

Bosold began developing his photography skills when he was 8 years old.

That's when his parents realized that "I would need another skill so they gave me a camera," he said.

He still has the Brownie, and has owned hundreds of others in a career that has created a body of aquatic, artistic work, large-scale images that hang in galleries and museums.

He shoots nature pictures and teaches large format photography in small group settings.

"People still want to get the perfect shot of a flower and a butterfly and hang it on their wall in a large format," he said. "I can teach them how to do that."

During his photographic career he had the full use of only one arm, which has made it a bit more difficult to manage the complex equipment needed to get the right shot.

He can switch a lens or change a roll of film -- which he still uses -- with the same physical compromises as brewing coffee: He gets it done even though he concedes "sometimes it looks painful."

Bosold said he was inspired by characters in books.

"My story is one about someone with challenges, who wanted to go see the characters his father read him bedtime stories about," he said.

"Stories by Samuel Clemens, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, all drew me to a Peter Sellers-like awestruck view of life and really 'being there'" -- an allusion to the 1979 movie, "Being There," which stared Sellers.

After work as a government statistician, he re-discovered photography and technology, mastering the point where the two intersected.

His camera habit is subsidized by what he calls "my corporate work" that includes data management and systems design.

He ended up in Port Townsend, devoting time into chronicling the activities of the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Hadlock.

He's taken plenty of pretty boat pictures, but has a greater interest in the people who build them.

"Boats have been built in the same way since the beginning of time," he said.

"People make the boats and then trust their lives to them, because they know how well they have been constructed.

"Their mentors are here amongst us, quietly build wooden boats and for years, sharing the boat yards with the next generation of young shipwrights, sailing in their footsteps."

To see some of Bosold's work, go to www.youtube.com/user/bosold.