Human memory is imperfect, so an RFID-enabled smartwatch that keeps track of the easily lost items in your world could be a boon. The tricky part is making sure the watch doesn’t remember everything.
At his lab in Seattle, Gaetano Borriello and his University of Washington team have built a working prototype of a smartwatch that operates using radio frequency identification tags to help people keep track of their stuff. The device is destined to become an application for the memory-challenged but is being designed with privacy rights in mind.
Here’s how the smartwatch works. When a tagged item passes a reader, the reader recognizes the item and sends radio energy to a personal server that checks it off the list of items present. If the item is missing and is part of a group of items programmed to be present at a given location, the watch will beep a warning that the item is not present, reminding the user to retrieve the missing item.
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(via wired)
Comments
@ 07:08
For the second time in a single day, please use the search engine before posting a story. I already mentioned this RFID-equipped watch, both on Smart Mobs and on my own blog (with more details and a picture) under the title “A Watch Smarter Than You” on October 8, 2004. It’s not because that an article appears six weeks later in Wired News that it has not been mentioned earlier here. Once again, please check before posting. Obviously, if the new story adds some value, it’s worth mentioning it (and adding previous references in Smart Mobs). In this case, the Wired News article didn’t bring much new information.