Using wearable tech to monitor employees is kind of creepy, but what if that monitoring could save lives? InformationWeek carries an interesting perspective article that suggests hospital patient outcomes might be better if nurses were checked in real time for error-inducing fatigue. … [Read more...]
Intimate Wearables Get Personal in Austin
It's no secret to frequent readers that we're not a big fan of "gimmick" wearables. Yet IEEE Spectrum's report on a SXSW session on tech-enabled intimate attire makes us sorry we weren't there. Durex, best known as a condom manufacturer, and Wearable Experiments' Billie Whitehouse were showing off some interactive undergardments designed by the fine folks at the marketing … [Read more...]
Wearables Were Hot at SXSW
If you want to know what's hot and hyped, you want to keep an eye on the SXSW conference, wrapping up today in Austin. This year, for better or worse, organizers apparently decided that wearables were It. This coincides perfectly with the industry's position at the peak of Gartner's Hype Cycle, by the way. We're taking a brief break from the road, else we'd have found some … [Read more...]
Wearables in Banking
Here's a thoughtful article about wearables by Aman Narain, the global head of digital banking at the big international bank Standard Chartered; he sees the possibilities in 9 billion wearable devices and all the data they throw off, although he's completely correct in being worried about security issues. At Mobile World Congress, we had a particularly interesting … [Read more...]
Fitbit for Dogs, But Where’s the Geo Capability?
We should probably state right at the start at we at Wearable Tech Insider are not particularly dog people, although we totally respect those who are. And so it would be wrong for us to make fun of a product like Whistle, which is a fitness tracker for Fido (an uncommon name with an interesting history that you probably don't know. But we digress...). Whistle does what … [Read more...]
Antarctica as a Wearables Test Bed
If you want to stress-test technology and neither space nor underwater are available, Antarctica is a pretty good choice. That's what the Canadian Space Agency is doing with body monitors that they want to send into space. Astroskin is an autonomous medical monitoring system for astronauts, which consists of an intelligent garment for the upper body and a headband fitted with … [Read more...]
Oakley’s Just Getting Started in Wearables
There's a solid adrenaline-soaked profile of Oakley's efforts in the wearables space written up in Stuff magazine's website. Execs brag that the Airwave HUD goggle is just the start of what they're planning (and not really the start either: Oakley says it started with wearables in 2004 with its Thump MP3 glasses frame). On the one hand, the Airwave is just a good Oakley … [Read more...]
Glass and the New Coming Barcodes
Adweek has a thin story about the fact that advertisers and agencies are experimenting with Google Glass, which only makes sense; if there's a digital agency not experimenting with Glass, they'll be out of business shortly. But it gives us a hook for something we saw last week at Mobile World Congress: using Glass to scan barcodes. It turns out that supermarket UPC codes are … [Read more...]
Moto Teases A Pretty Wearable, But Not Much Else
Motorola, in a state of continual change for the last few years, says it's going to ship a pretty wearable. We don't know anything else about it -- like what it might do. Or when it might ship. Or what it might cost. We just have a promise that it'll look nice. The device part of Moto, one of the great brands in technology since the first car radio, was sold to Google in … [Read more...]
STMicroelectronics Demos Smart Headphones That Can Sense What You’re Looking At
We had an unexpectedly long and interesting conversation today with STMicroelectronics, a company you almost certainly have never heard of unless you're deep into digital componentry. They're a big ($8 billion 2013 revenue) chip maker, based in Switzerland, and their products are in -- among many other things -- the Pebble watch and Jawbone Up. As a tech demo, Marco … [Read more...]