A teenager who lost his hand to meningitis has become the first in Britain to be fitted with a revolutionary bionic replacement - operated using an iPhone.
Patrick Kane, 16, can now control his state-of-the-art left hand using a mobile application on his iPhone 5 which gives him 24 different pre-set grips.
But is something totally different. It’s an appcessory billed as a “personal environment monitor,” and through its collection of four peripherals, Lapka gathers analog measures of humidity/temperature, radiation, electromagnetic frequencies (EMF), and organicity (whether or not a food is truly organic). And it does so beautifully, with a mix of plastic and wood components—aesthetics that were considered down to the circuit boards, which will also match in white.
Bandai, the creator of the original Tamagotchi, has announced another big move into the world of electronic animal care with Smartpet — a robot dog that uses your iPhone as a brain. Controlled via a free app, Smartpet will react to your touchscreen gestures with over 100 facial expressions, and you can make it do tricks by voice commands or movements in front of the Facetime camera. As the pet gets more emotionally attached to you it’ll learn more reactions, and it can also sing and dance with other dogs via Bluetooth. It’s not all fun and games, though, as Smartpet also functions as an alarm clock and handsfree phone.
John Lennon claimed to have written the lyric, “What do you see when you turn out the light?” But most don’t know that he originally answered his own musical question with: “I can’t tell you, but I know I’d have an easier time if I had quick access to a state-of-the-art third-generation optical night vision accessory.” A true visionary, he was clearly way ahead of his time. Because just a month and a half ago at the SHOT Show in Las Vegas, the iPhone Night Vision Adapter made its debut.
Engineers are developing a wireless device that enables people with spinal cord injuries to operate a computer and maneuver a wheelchair simply by moving their tongues.
The experiment began at 11 a.m. in my bedroom in Brooklyn. I bought an app from the iTunes store called EpicWin, a fantasy-themed game designed to improve users’ lives by motivating them to accomplish real-world goals with virtual-world rewards. Before starting the game, I had to pick and customize an avatar that would represent me in the digital landscape of EpicWin. I chose a cadaverous warrior named Calcium Facebone. He held a blunt mallet in one hand. “Add new task,” the screen read. Since I was planning to write a story about my experience, I typed in “Start article.” A surge of ominous music rattled from the iPhone speakers, and Calcium Facebone appeared on a rumpled map on the screen. Miles traveled: 0.
Handheld gadgets could one day diagnose infections at the push of a button by using the supersensitive touchscreens in today’s smartphones. Many believe that in the future collecting samples of saliva, urine or blood could be performed using a cheap, USB-stick-sized throwaway device called a lab-on-a-chip. The user would inject a droplet of the fluid in the chip, and micropumps inside it would send the fluid to internal vessels containing reagents that extract target disease biomarker molecules. The whole device would then be sent to a lab for analysis.
UP by Jawbone — Welcome to a Healthier You
Jawbone will track your fitness, diet, sleep, and other data points to help you be more healthy.
Concerned mothers and congressmen have publicly lamented that children don’t know the difference between video games and the real world. Little did they realize that in the future there won’t truly be a difference. Case in point: Sphero from Orbotix. About the size of a baseball, Sphero is a rolling robot that you can control with your smart phone (iOS and Android) through an easy touchscreen interface, or simply by tilting. Sphero is much more than the successor to the remote controlled car, however.
