Categories
Nutrition/Hydration Sensors/IoT

The One X biosensor lets you pick up on your body’s vibes

Everyone is generally aware of the elements that contribute to a healthy lifestyle: nutrition-dense foods, ample water, some exercise and plenty of sleep, just to name a few. But the one issue most people have is actually quantifying the kind of lifestyle being led with something other than that vague sense of ‘feeling bad’. Luckily, the One X does exactly that.

The One X is a nutritional biosensor that can effectively measure the body’s antioxidant level, a reliable metric for understanding how well the body is able to cope with various lifestyle challenges along with the body’s reaction to elements like sun, alcohol, nutrition, exercise, pollution, stress and sleep. It’s able to do this through high-quality optic sensors that analyze critical skin antioxidants called carotenids with a 20-scan of the palm. Since carotenids absorb light in the blue spectrum, the One X pumps blue light into the palm and reads how much is absorbed for an accurate measurement of the body’s overall health. The worse the lifestyle, the lower the score: This gives up to five users (courtesy of a handy fingerprint sensor) clear incentive to make better decisions throughout the day.

Categories
Sensors/IoT Smart Home

Knocki lets you turn surfaces into a remote for anything

editors-choiceIt’s 3 a.m. and it would be nice to turn the TV and lights off without getting out of bed.

patent-claimedKnocki is a short, cylindrical device that attaches to any surface and transforms that surface into a touch interface that can control other devices. Users set Knocki to perform specific actions through a set number of taps. It uses non-acoustic sensor technology to detect gentle surface gestures that are even a short distance away, but Knocki also has the ability to filter out random vibrations. The device works anywhere there is Wi-Fi, and there is a companion Android and iOS app for it.

 

Categories
Connected Objects Health and Wellness Sensors/IoT

uHoo version 2. Smart air quality sensor returns with a new look

Unbeknownst to many, indoor air is usually two to five times worse than outdoor air. And as a whole, air quality is the single largest environmental hazard in the world today. Not many people do much about the air inside, though, because they simply don’t know. The lightweight, portable uHoo smart air quality sensor empowers people to act using exact readings of the surrounding air quality.

The uHoo’s soda can-like form belies the eight dedicated sensors it uses to compile accurate air quality readings for a completely open space of 400 square feet. Not only is temperature, humidity, air pressure and dust accounted for, but uHoo keeps an eye on some of the nastier stuff like PM 2.5, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds (VOC) as well.

Categories
Connected Objects Kids/Babies Sensors/IoT

Butterfly Bluetooth thermometer lights up your life like a baby’s smile

Caring for a feverish child is a consuming process. Parents not only must keep a close watch on the child’s temperature using thermometers even during stressful times like in the middle of the night, but they also have to keep track of the all the measurements to better inform doctors of the child’s health.

Butterfly aims to make this easier to do. It’s comprised of a dime-sized temperature sensor, a base station, and a mobile iOS/Android app. The water-resistant temperature sensor can be stuck onto a child’s body to constantly gather temperature readings. These readings are sent to the base station and displayed on its small LED screen, and reflected in the three colored lights Butterfly uses to quickly inform parents at a glance. (A blue light is normal, a yellow light means elevated temperatures, and a red light means a fever.)

Categories
Connected Objects Imaging Maker/Development Sensors/IoT

Sweep eyes an opportunity for affordable LIDAR sensors

LIDAR sensor technology is being used in a growing number of products. For example, these sensors serve as the eyes of self-driving car, enabling them to detect other objects on the road. LIDAR scanners are sold on their own, but they tend to be too pricey for the average consumer, sometimes coming in at more than $1,000.

Sweep is an inexpensive scanning LIDAR sensor for consumer applications including high school robotics projects. digital art and drones. It can also be used to get the dimensions of a room much faster than it would take when using a tape measure. It can also be used to detect when somebody walks through a doorway or tries to touch something they shouldn’t. Sweep uses sensing technology that differs from most other LIDAR sensors on the market –- a technique that enables it to use lower power components to perform long-range measurements.

Categories
Connected Objects Sensors/IoT

Use the Droppler to drop your rate of H2O waste

Every year, the problem of water waste continues. It’s imperative to do whatever possible to slow the rate of waste, and while people usually think of large scale solutions when it comes to these equally large problems, everything really begins in a more familiar place: at home.

The Droppler is a connected device that lives in the kitchen or the bathroom, riding the coattails of the heightened use of voice-controlled gadgets like Amazon’s Echo by constantly listening to instances of running water. It was born out of a desire to more readily understand water usage, and to do so pairs with an accompanying smartphone app to monitor water usage and allow users to set goals in dollars versus other, indecipherable standards.

In addition, its modular construction can be upgraded easily or even expanded upon depending on what becomes available for it. The Droppler can be had for $99 and is expected to ship in June 2016. Its $70,000 goal needs to be met by $70,000 to be successful.

The Droppler is a novel solution to saving water in the home. Unfortunately, its core functionality is something a majority of mic-equipped connected devices would be able to replicate with programming. Still, it definitely can help, especially combined with shower specific water-saving solutions like the Cullector or EVA.

 

Categories
Imaging Sensors/IoT

Flail your arms to control apps in-home with ZKOO gesture camera

Leap Motion made a splash a few years ago when it debuted a fascinating add-on product for Macs and PCs that allowed anyone to interface with their devices via gestures. But since it only worked for Macs and PC, the number of situations in which it was truly useful was limited.

Exvision’s ZKOO gesture-tracking camera is touted as the most advanced in the world, but truth be told it doesn’t do much more the Leap Motion can. Using a camera that tracks motion at 100 frames per second it is able to deliver a gesture-tracking experience that boast low latency for both PCs and Android devices, working with hundreds of existing apps out of the box.

Categories
Automotive Sensors/IoT

GStop’s out to stop rear-end collisions

Car safety has become one of the most common goals of crowdfunding projects.

GStop is a connected brake safety light for cars that’s designed to prevent rear-end collisions. The device gets connected to a consumer’s third brake light and, when its sensor detects heavy breaking, it immediately causes rapid flashing to the high-level rear brake light to inform drivers behind the user’s car that they should slow down or stop. GStop also works for bikes, motorcycles and vans.

Categories
Maker/Development Sensors/IoT

MATRIX’s sensor platform seeks to be The One for the Internet of Things

editors-choiceSmartphones are so ubiquitous because just one replaces a wide variety of real-world objects. This has yet to happen to in the world of Internet of Things. Instead, more and more companies create more hardware that do different things, and therefore, introduce more fragmentation. This makes things difficult for the developers and end-users who would have been clamoring for a standard that could simplify the entire IoT experience.

By applying the lessons learned from what the smartphone did for the real world, the folks at AdMobilize have designed MATRIX. Just as a smartphone combined a number of capabilities into one, slim package, MATRIX’s 15 different, embedded sensors do the same — just for the home or business.

Categories
Apparel Kids/Babies Sensors/IoT

Hoko smart comfort monitor keeps your toddler temperate

It would be helpful if parents could be quickly informed if their small child is too hot or cold, especially when engaged in outdoor activities for an extended period of time.

Hoko is a smart, portable comfort monitor that should enable exactly that. One side of Hoko is a small, circular device containing a microprocessor, along with temperature and humidity sensors, that gets placed inside a child’s clothing. That side of the product is attached to a piece of soft fabric with a cute doll on the other side that serves as Hoko’s interface.