Here is the opening paragraph of the IEEE’s introduction to their online article ‘New Products.’

“In this issue, we cover an application that will help the deaf communicate via mobile phones using American Sign Language. We also highlight a navigation application that uses 3D images to help people better orient maps to the environment. We cover a service that helps protect users’ privacy from acquaintances and another that supports text messaging conferences. We also present a smart refrigerator, a smart shoe, and a book reader with a rollup display. Finally, we present a wireless hard disk that stores audio/video files and lets you access them from a variety of entertainment devices.”

And, from another IEEE article titled ‘Sensor-Driven Computing Comes of Age’, we read “However, it’s the mobility of a modern
platform as used today that makes this type of sensor relevant. An engineer would have no reason to design an accelerometer into a classic desktop computer because it doesn’t move. But he or she could use one in a mobile computer to determine its tilt angle, whether it’s shaken, and whether it’s moving. Furthermore, analyzing the data can provide important supplementary information—for example, a rapid acceleration to a constant speed might indicate use in a car rather than walking or at a desk—and can be used to infer a user’s activity in general. A good example of infrastructural context is location, and is typically
obtained by sensing reference points in the surrounding environment. Developers can use location knowledge to create location-based services, which have been explored in detail in research organizations, but still have many unrealized opportunities commercially. LBS can derive location information from many sources, such as a GPS receiver that relies on signals transmitted from a collection of satellites in orbit; measuring the signal strength of nearby cell phone towers; or detecting the presence
of nearby RFID tags through local interrogation. The former has been widely exploited in automobile navigation systems,
such as Hertz’s Neverlost, and in handheld navigation devices, such as Garmin’s eTrex. The latter provides an opportunity for a rich set of indoor location services that could be catalyzed in the future by the widespread use of RFID technologies employed for itemlevel tagging (see the Jan.–March 2006 IEEE Pervasive Computing special issue on RFID Technology).

As soon as these services become available in the UK, there will be demand for them. Some of the demand will be from disabled persons. They will ask for government to provide these services. This is only the beginning.