A while ago, I posted about the XPrize being offered for the development of a Tricorder-like health-tracking device. In the last few weeks, one promising entrant, the Scanadu Scout, has raised $1.3 million through Indiegogo. The Scanadu Scout is a small, handheld, disc-shaped device that when placed against your forehead…

Today I read a great article on Make  by Gregory Hill about the differences between a magical and a hackable system. On a complete system like a computer with full-blown Windows, Mac or Linux OS, you can download and install millions of programs and learn how to program, how to…

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything in a while, so a brief update may be in order. In the last three months, I graduated from UC San Diego with a master’s degree, got a job at Fitbit in San Francisco, and moved from San Diego to Oakland.…

As an embedded software engineer who is interested in bringing HCI design practice to embedded devices, I often hear people say, “Oh but we don’t have a display on our device, so I’m not sure we need that”. Somehow, the embedded systems community seems to have decided that well designed…

If you remember the Tricorder from Star Trek, it was a device that, when waved over a patient, would diagnose them immediately. The X Prize Foundation is trying to make that a reality.

Lean Startup is essentially applying HCI and UX concepts to startups. The product you are designing is your business, including all its components – the solution, who you think your customer is, how you plan to target them , and how you intend to make money. You test all the…

Touch is slick and easy but it’s not for everything. And it’s already going out of style. The new kid in town is a natural user interface, Post-Touch – an interface that goes past the requirement of touch and can detect gesture usually through a near-field depth camera.

As it turns out, “revealing where one lives and works at the granularity of census blocks is uniquely identifying for a majority of the U.S. working population.” Anonymous location data really isn’t.

New cellphones are showing up with NFC readers embedded in them, which not only flips the technology around, it allows two-way communication. Now, you can request and use the information instead of the other way around.