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For ages, I’ve wanted to create an Arduino project that will sit in my laundry room (shared in a small complex) and monitor whether the machines are being used or not, so we don’t have to keep checking. But now, a kickstarter project called Twine has beat me to by creating a cool new product to notify you based on sensor information that you can setup. It’s a versatile product that could have many creative uses.
With the inspiring Olympic displays of the power and grace of the human body all around us, it seems sad that we confine the human body that is capable of so much strength, agility and power, to interfaces that involve the user of just one finger. In designing interfaces, we need to look at the actual task at hand and design the best interface for it, not just the best touchscreen interface.
Awarepoint provides a Real Time Location System for healthcare that is non-intrusive in that it doesn’t require users to change their behaviour, but instead integrates into their environment and provides benefit through improving patient care and reducing risks and errors. It uses a proprietary Zigbee-based protocol which means the tags used for tracking the interactions need no recharging for the life of the product.
The black box recorders onboard Flight 447 showed that design features in the Airbus cockpit contributed to the confusion of the pilots.
Remember the future the way we imagined it back in the day? Where everything was magically all-knowing and connected – Your home detected when you returned and played your tunes, lit up the walls with your favorite art and warmed the house up just the way you like it. Why did the dream of ubiquitous computing degenerate into the nightmare of ubiquitous chargers? How might low-power wireless technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy save it?
