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If you are a health conscious person or a hypochondriac, you already must have various gadgets that help you keep track of your vitals.
To add to the list of your health related gadgets, here are two cool gadgets that were announced at the CES 2013. Withings announced the Smart Activity ...
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In the old days, people can tell what someone is feeling by their facial expressions or by using special mouth sounds like “I’m sad. I don’t have anyone to talk to, which makes it sadder that I’m talking right now.” But apparently people these days are lying cowards who don’t want to express what they really feel. So now we have this.
The device is called the Tailly. It was invented by Shota Ishiwatari, the same man who came up with the brain-controlled cat ears and tails. The Tailly on the other hand looks at the wearer’s heart rate.
It’s a testament to how long I’ve been writing for Technabob that it’s the boring outfits of the people in the video that I find to be really weird and not the fake tails they’re wearing. Pledge at least £60 (~$96 USD) Kickstarter page to reserve your own Tailly. I’ll jump on the bandwagon when they come up with something that lets me run as fast as a cheetah.
If you’ve ever used a heart rate monitor to track your fitness level while running or cycling, you’ll know that these usually aren’t compact devices. Most of them involve strapping a harness around your body so that the monitor can get a decent reading from your heart. This latest watch from MIO plans on getting rid of the bulk.
The MIO Alpha watch uses a sophisticated sensor that has an electro-optical cell and a pair of light beams to track the volume of blood under your wrist, and also compensates for the jostling of the sensor.
Data collected by the watch can be sent to your mobile device via Bluetooth 4.0. While it can continuously monitor your heart rate and activity times, the watch has no built-in GPS, so you’ll have to rely on a separate device or your smartphone for that.
The MIO Alpha was funded via Kickstarter earlier this year, and will go on sale for $199(USD) and will be available early next year at retail.
Nintendo may have left its Vitality Sensor by the wayside, but researchers at Boston Children's Hospital are using heart rate monitoring in a video game to teach children with anger issues how to temper their emotions. Dubbed RAGE (Regulate and Gain Emotional) Control, the game tasks players with blasting hostile spaceships while keeping their heart rate from exceeding a predefined limit. If a gamer's pulse rises above the ceiling, they'll lose the ability to shoot until they can ease their pulse back down. A group of 18 kids who received standard treatments and played the game for five, 15-minute-long sessions had better control of their heart rate and lower anger levels than a group that only used traditional treatments. Currently, a controlled clinical trial of RAGE Control is underway and there are plans to take the concept a step further with toys and games suited for younger children. Look out below for the full press release or tap the second source link for the team's paper in the Journal of Adolescent Psychiatry.
[Image credit: Thirteen of Clubs, Flickr]
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Researchers create video game that monitors heart rate to keep children's anger in check originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Boston Children's Hospital, Bentham Science Publishers | Email this | Comments There are a number of wearable devices on the market these days which can monitor your activity when you exercise, but they’re all pretty much glorified motion sensors, which extrapolate your activity level based on movement. Now, a team of engineers from MIT is working on a new kind of wearable sensor which could not only monitor motion, but vital health statistics.
The Amiigo wearable sensor is not only capable of detecting movements and gestures, but also your heart rate, blood oxygen levels and skin temperature. All of these data points can help you monitor the effectiveness and safety of your workout routine. In addition, the Amiigo monitor is waterproof, so it can even go in the swimming pool, making it a great gadget idea for triatheletes and winter sports buffs.
The device will come with two sensor components – one worn on the wrist, the other clipped onto the shoe. A companion smartphone app will track all of your workouts and physical activities in detail, as well as enable competition and sharing with friends. A set of proprietary discrimination and machine learning algorithms can even discern exactly what sort of activities you’re partaking in and record these automatically. For instance, it could identify the difference between a bicep curl and a pull-up.
The guys behind the Amiigo also plan on offering an SDK for the device, which would allow for the creation of custom software which could leverage the data from the sensors – whether for other fitness or health applications, or even for gaming.
The Amiigo will be launching a crowdfunding campaign at the end of October, and you can sign up to be notified about it over on their website.
I’ve got a heart rate monitor, but it’s tied to a strap that connects wirelessly to my Garmin 500 cycling computer. There are also numerous smartphone apps which can measure your pulse when you cover up the camera and flash with your fingertip. But the Cardiio app for iOS uses MIT technology to measure your heart rate without even a touch, simply by “looking” at your face.
Cardiio measures when your face is reflecting more light and when it’s not, giving you a semi-accurate idea of what your heart rate is without having to strap a sensor to your wrist or chest. The slight increase in blood volume to your face whenever your heart beats causes more light to be absorbed, hence it is less reflected. Using this, the app tracks these changes and calculates your heart rate.
According to one study, the technology is accurate to within 3 beats-per-minute of a clinical pulse oximeter in a well-lit environment. Cardiio is available through iTunes for $4.99 (USD), and is compatible with the iPhone 4/4S, iPad 2 and above and 4th gen iPod Touch.
[via Uncrate]