How many time have you come home after a long day and settled into your couch to binge Netflix? And how many times have you fallen asleep and woken up episodes later? Netflix is prepared to make your bingeing life a lot easier, with Netflix socks that pause your TV if you fall asleep or just admire the inside of your eyelids for too long. Here’s the great thing about this: … [Read more...]
Kapture Records The Sounds Around You
Do you go through your day thinking, “Wait! What just happened”? Want to preserve baby’s unexpected first word? Something amazing your friend just said? Something you overheard a stranger saying? Take a look at Kapture, a wristband that continuously records your audible world in 60-second loops. A tap on the band and the last loop is saved. Send it to your smartphone and, … [Read more...]
Urine-Powered Wearables on the Horizon
If you really need electrical power, it may ill suit you to be fussy about where it comes from. British researchers, for instance, have developed a fuel cell that can use urine and steps to generate electricity. The urine comes from the expected source. The breakthrough here is using human power generated by walking to circulate the pee through microbial fuel cells, which … [Read more...]
Bandages Get a Hydrogel Upgrade
MIT's got an interest in wearable technology with the creation of a “smart Band-Aid,” a flexible, adhesive hydrogel that can carry health sensors and monitor a patient’s condition. With a reservoir in the gel, the dressing can also deliver medication and warn when the medication level getting low. Researchers think one of the first uses for the hydrogel -- which is 90 … [Read more...]
Old MacDonald Tracks His Cows
We commonly think of wearables for people and wearables for machines. However, it turns out that cows now have their own wearables and "cow chip" has a whole new—and less malodorous—meaning. And apparently the cows are milking it for all it’s worth, on their own. Precision farming, or precision agriculture, is essentially farm management based on numbers. Since the numbers … [Read more...]
VFILES, XO Help Lady Gaga Fly In the Face of Fashion
VFILES, a New York Web portal, is a clearinghouse for digital fashion, a social network for all aspects of the burgeoning tech fashion industry. They’re the source for Lady Gaga’s flying dress, Volantis, and Azealia Banks’s “mermaid bra,” both by Studio XO. They're now collaborating on bringing the clothes to the public. The Volantis flying dress has gotten a lot of media … [Read more...]
Tattoos for Healthy Living
Tattoos, however cool, are not usually associated with health, but Austin-based tech development company Chaotic Moon Studios is looking to change that with TechTats. The biowearable has an elegant steampunk look, with all the circuitry operational. It can track the wearer’s biometric data via an Atiny85 microcontroller and electro conductive paint, and download the data to … [Read more...]
“Pay As You Live” Health Insurance?
Someone's got the bright dystopian idea of using fitness tracker data to individualize health insurance rates. The "Pay as You Live" concept is based on "Pay as You Drive" insurance programs such as Progressive’s Snapshot, where you snap a dongle in your car to track how you drive; safer behaviors supposedly result in lower car insurance rates. Some members of the British … [Read more...]
Intel Introduces “Wearable Smart Gateway” for First Responders
It seems like an obvious market opportunity: body-worn technology and first responders. Turns out, though, that the first-response industry is extremely demanding and conservative. It spends limited taxpayer money, procurement cycles are long and competitive (and not-infrequently clubby), interconnectivity is a must, and system failures can literally cost lives. Civilians … [Read more...]
Blocks: DIY Modular Smartwatch
Wish your smartwatch came with more or different functions? Is there just that one thing missing that would make it exactly what you want? Blocks might have be able to make your day fairly soon. The Blocks modular watch has taken some two years of development just to get to Kickstarter. Their original goal was to raise $250,000; to date, they have raised more than $1 … [Read more...]