Hasta La Gadget!

Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale already stands out in your bathroom: sleek, smooth and fully functional, the very opposite of the sagging meat sack you drag into the shower every morning. Now it can beam your insecurities to your poor Twitter followers, automatically, before you have even thought about brewing a wake-up cup of coffee.

The Withings scale, you may remember, records body mass, fat levels and other paranoia-inducing statistics and compiles them for presentation on the web or on your iPhone. Now, the $160 scale adds Twittering to its list of “encouragements”.

Set up your account details and the scale will reveal your weight to the world every time you hop on. It can be configured to Tweet daily, weekly or monthly and will post the amount of lard you have to shed before you reach your goal. The upscale scale has support for up to eight people and their accounts, making it easy to organize an ongoing bulimia marathon amongst housemates.

The most amazing part about this story, though, is that it features a weighing scale that can receive software updates over the air. We’re clearly living in the future.

Product page [Withings. Thanks, Jessica!]

See Also:

• IPhone-Connected Weighing Scale for Your iDiet

It’s been well over a year since we last saw the laser-guided, self-docking wheelchair developed by folks at Lehigh University, and now the team is back with an altogether more ambitious project. According to associate professor John Spletzer, the recipient of a five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the goal is to “extend the autonomy of the wheelchair so it can navigate completely in an urban setting and take you wherever you need to go.” This will be done by equipping robotic chairs with laser and camera sensors (which the team developed for the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge) as well as exhaustive, Google Street View-esque maps of the city where they will be operating. Of course, these guys will be operating in a busy urban environment, so in addition to large-scale 3D maps, they must be equipped with motion planning features for operating in dense crowds and a changing environment. It’s too soon yet to say when these things might become available commercially, but if you’re a resident of the Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Hospital in Allentown, PA, you might have your chance to test one soon enough.

[Via PhysOrg]

Filed under: Robots

NSF backs development of laser-guided robot wheelchairs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Those mad neuroscientists, they’ll never learn, but maybe in the end we’ll all be better off for it. Wired has put together an extremely intriguing write-up of the short history of optogenetics — featuring a German pond scum researcher, a Nobel Prize winner, and rat brains controlled by beams of light. Optogenetics is a relatively new technique for communicating with the brain, which involves the implantation of particular light-sensitive genes into animals with the purpose of repairing neurological ailments through light therapy (no, not that kind). By hooking up fiber-optic cables to the affected area of the brain, researchers have been able to completely restore movement in mice with Parkinson’s disease and their current efforts revolve around developing a less invasive method that doesn’t go deeper than the outer surface of the brain. Most revolutionary of all, perhaps, is the eventual possibility for two-way traffic (i.e. a machine being able to both send and receive information from the brain), which brings all those cyborg dreams of ours closer to becoming a reality than ever before. Hit up the read link for the full dish.

Filed under: Science

Optogenetics hold the key to future brain disease cures, still creep us out originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For the last sixteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds I’ve been watching this video in absolute awe. It’s the story of John Kanzius who designed, built, and tested a machine (on himself), all in hopes of curing his leukemia.

Good God, I’m happy that this story is finally coming out, but it’s so heart wrenching to see Kanzius’ struggle, desperation, and utter drive to find a way to zap leukemia despite doctors’ cautions to the very end. [CBS via Make]

If there’s one thing scarier than going to the hospital for some potentially harmful harmfulness, it’s getting sicker due to some minor slip-up in the carefully-observed hygiene practices of your own personal Zach Braff M.D. That’s where Vioguard’s newly shipping UVKB50 self-sanitizing keyboard comes in, with a proximity detector to let a set of freshly sanitized keys slide out for use by a health care professional, which slide back once they’re not in use to get re-sterilized with anti-bacterial ultraviolet light. The $899 pricetag isn’t too bad given the application, but it probably won’t be making our own cubicles safer any time soon. Video of the keyboard in action is after the break.

Continue reading Vioguard’s self-sanitizing keyboard means maybe we don’t all have to die this year

Filed under: Peripherals

Vioguard’s self-sanitizing keyboard means maybe we don’t all have to die this year originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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