The garmin fenix 5x plus has incident detection to alert your contacts. If, for instance, you fall while cycling and the owlette smart sock tracks, babies, heart rates and oxygen levels, giving you peace of mind while they’re in their cribs, there are so many ways that wearable tech is providing us more information, but i’m still wondering what’s. Next for wearables introducing next generation galaxy watch active most watches, just capture data, but we’ve devised a watch that doesn’t just collect information it’s smart enough to interpret it. We developed sophisticated motion sensors that scrutinize your movements so like a personal trainer watch, advises you how to improve your performance and reach your goals. Watch ingeniously detects when you’re active and when you’re not we designed it to keep track of your stress levels. So you can reset whenever you need to and it’s configured to combine seamlessly with the samsung health app. So you can manage your fitness. Look after your well being and even monitor the rem quality of your sleep in a truly revolutionary move. We’Ve introduced wireless powershare, which will charge your watch right from the galaxy s10. All you have to do is choose a strap pick a face and let watch active go to work. Next generation galaxy watch active the smart watch that gives you smart advice, we’re here at the university of minnesota’s wearable technology lab where we’re going to show you not only the future of wearables, but also how they can collaborate with existing technology.
You can find on your best, buy shelves now, like your fitness, trackers and smart watches, and to do that i’m here with the founder of the lab herself, dr lucy dunn. So what are some of the major problems that your lab is looking to solve with wearable technology? Well, if you think of clothing, as kind of like the second skin or the portable environment or the thing that’s around us all the time, it kind of has this wonderful opportunity to meet needs and to do things for you and that are always constantly there. So a lot of what we do is look at at using the clothing as a sensing platform to figure out what you’re doing or what you might want, as well as using it to make a change in your immediate environment. So heat you up or pull you down or squeeze you or provide you information, so i know i’m about to try on these gloves and on the surface they look pretty normal, but there’s a lot more going on under the surface, with these haptic sensors. Can you tell me a little more about that sure, so these gloves are designed for firefighters and it’s, designed to help them navigate a dark or smoky environment that they might not be familiar with. So what we wanted to do was give them a sixth sense, a special way to be able to feel their way around the room. So the dot on the back here is an ultrasonic range, finder it’s, just a distance sensor, and it takes the distance to the nearest obstacle that you’re shining it at and then it converts that distance into the intensity of vibration in the glove.
So you can kind of pan around the room and you can. You can feel a stronger vibration when there’s an obstacle near you and a much weaker vibration when something’s far away so is the haptic technology. Is it relatable to like a backup sensor in a car or sonar yeah that’s exactly the way it works, it’s sending out a little pulse of ultrasonic energy and then it’s waiting for it to be reflected back, so my sister is a firefighter in atlanta and i’m. Constantly thinking about her safety, so i could see how a piece of technology like this would help her, but my brother isn’t a firefighter at all. So how do you see a glove like this ending up in his hands? Well, it’s sort of a situational awareness tool. I guess more generally, so you could imagine if he was a cyclist. For instance, it might alert him to obstacles that are coming up on one side or another, even the driver of the car there’s. A lot of work now with haptic displays in the car seat to give you that kind of a peripheral sense of what’s around you. What are some other consumer electronics you can see benefiting from including this type of haptic technology? So let’s say your smart watch is measuring where you are in a space, and this is mapping the topography of this space and you can fuse those together and make like a dynamic map. That would understand both where you are in a building and what the environment looks like.
So, while these gloves were specifically designed for firefighters, this was designed for astronauts. Can you explain a little more about this sleeve nasa was interested in understanding better. What we could do to help guide the visible movements of a crew member when they’re really far from anyone who could physically guide it? So this sleeve has an array of tactile motors embedded in it, so that we can prototype some of those interactions or cues. Are those movements being programmed into the sleeve or is there somebody on the other end wearing a sleeve that’s, also performing the same movement? It could be either way. I mean it could be a pre formed sequence. It could be a joystick you’d, be marionetting. Somebody else. So how could you see a piece of technology like this, integrating in virtual reality and augmented reality, where giving the haptic feedback in a video game would only increase the customer’s experience? I think the sense of touch is the real big missing piece right now in all these immersive experiences and being able to immerse your physical body as well as your vision, and your cognition would really elevate that experience. So you could imagine you know a physical environment that you’re in being able to feel a breeze or a temperature change, or things like that or to be able to interact with virtual objects in a way where you can really feel the tactile sensation. But again, all these areas really have a lot of open research questions, so understanding how to generate those impulses and then how to interpret them is really exciting for the field.
I think, with their work on wearable tactile displays the university of minnesota wearable technology lab is changing how information is communicated to the user, while these innovations are massively impressive on their own it’s, how they might one day interact with products already available at best.FBnkLyJwXnw
