Tag Archives: wearable computing

the Oura

The Oura is a fitness tracker, but unlike others it is a ring you wear on a single finger. See Wired article here and company website here. It seems to focus mostly on measuring your heart beat and temperature – all the time – and coming up with a variety of metrics and feedback for you based on that. The NBA and NASCAR have apparently given them to all their athletes (yes, I maintain that race car drivers are athletes, but we can continue the debate down at the corner bar when and if it reopens.)

I’m curious about fitness trackers, but if I ever invest in something I would like blood pressure and nutrition to somehow be incorporated.

Swedes getting chippy

According to NPR, people in Sweden are voluntarily inserting microchips into their fingers and using them for identification and payment.

The chips are designed to speed up users’ daily routines and make their lives more convenient — accessing their homes, offices and gyms is as easy as swiping their hands against digital readers.

They also can be used to store emergency contact details, social media profiles or e-tickets for events and rail journeys within Sweden…

Around the size of a grain of rice, the chips typically are inserted into the skin just above each user’s thumb, using a syringe similar to that used for giving vaccinations. The procedure costs about $180.

There are also some interesting statistics on the declining use of cash in Sweden. The article says that in Stockholm only 1 in 4 people uses cash once a week (or more) and only 15 percent of retail transactions involve cash (and this was already down to less than half as of 2010).

Google Glass is back

According to Wired:

Google relaunched the gadget as a tool for businesses called Google Glass Enterprise Edition. Pilot projects have involved Boeing workers using Glass on helicopter production lines, and doctors wearing it in the examining room.

Anat Karni, product lead at Plataine, slid on a black version of Glass Tuesday to demonstrate the app. She showed how the app could tell a worker clocking in for the day about production issues that require urgent attention, and show useful information for resolving problems on the device’s display.

A worker can also talk to Plataine’s app to get help. Karni demonstrated how a worker walking into a storeroom could say “Help me select materials.” The app would respond, verbally and on the display, with what materials would be needed and where they could be found. A worker’s actions could be instantly visible to factory bosses, synced into the software Plataine already provides customers, such as Airbus, to track production operations.

augmented reality and Rainbow’s End

This video is meant to convey a concept of what augmented reality could look like in the not-too-distant future. Which reminded me of Rainbow’s End, a fantastic Vernor Vinge novel set in the not-too-distant future. In Rainbow’s End, people have wearable computing and contact lenses that allow them to project pretty much anything they want onto the world, from basic information to, yes, strange fantastic beasts. The dark side of the novel is that weapons of mass destruction have also progressed quite a bit, and various governments and groups are fighting that behind the scenes unbeknownst to most of the people and their gadgets.

passive haptic learning

Researchers at Georgia Tech have taken a small step toward the dream of learning without effort.

Tactile taps teach rhythmic text entry: passive haptic learning of morse code

Passive Haptic Learning (PHL) is the acquisition of sensorimotor skills with little or no active attention to learning. This technique is facilitated by wearable computing, and applications are diverse. However, it is not known whether rhythm-based information can be conveyed passively. In a 12 participant study, we investigate whether Morse code, a rhythmbased text entry system, can be learned through PHL using the bone conduction transducer on Google Glass. After four hours of exposure to passive stimuli while focusing their attention on a distraction task, PHL participants achieved a 94% accuracy rate keying a pangram (a phrase with all the letters of the alphabet) using Morse code on Glass’s trackpad versus 53% for the control group. Most PHL participants achieved 100% accuracy before the end of the study. In written tests, PHL participants could write the codes for each letter of the alphabet with 98% accuracy versus 59% for control. When perceiving Morse code, PHL participants also performed significantly better than control: 83% versus 46% accuracy.