Hasta La Gadget!

There are some people who are just don’t know how to take care of plants. Or it might be that you’ve got some special plants in your house that need special care. It’s for reasons like that some designers decided to come up with this device, which allows you to detect the health of your plants.

An entry in the LiteOn Design Awards, The Plant Doctor was conceived by Fan Xu and Du Xubing. The device uses integrated sensors and a microcontroller to detect soil moisture, nutrition content, etc. All of this data can be charted on a transparent display so that you can monitor the health of your plants. It’s also supposed to power itself from the electrolytes in the soil. The device will analyze the soil content and process this information.

While there are similar devices on the market already, the Plant Doctor is still just a concept; but I can already see it being used all over the place, especially when horticulturists are trying to grow and care for rare plants. For the rest of us, there’s always this.

[via Yanko Design]

While fitness sensors are cool, there are plenty of other uses for remote sensors. These environmental sensors allow you to keep track of indoor spaces in your home.

CubeSensors can record environment conditions and send them to the cloud, which will allow you to access them via any mobile device. An app sends you notifications about how to better tailor your environment for better productivity or comfort. Each cube can sense temperature, humidity, noise, light, air quality, barometric pressure, and even vibrations.

They can be used at home or at the office, and are designed to be relatively unobtrusive. The CubeSensors will be released this summer and are available for pre-order for $250(USD) for a pair with their base station, or $350 for a set of four. Additional cubes retail for $99 each. You can reserve your set for just a $10 down-payment.

[via core77]

MC10 might be best known for its wearable electronics aimed at athletes, but the company also makes a medical diagnostic sticker called a biostamp. Its creator (and MC10 co-founder), John Rogers has refined that design so that it’s no longer an elastomer sticker — now he can apply the biostamp’s thin, stretchy electronics directly on human skin, and bond it with commercially available spray-on bandage material. By losing the elastomer backing of the original biostamp and applying the circuits directly to the skin, Rogers and his team at the University of Illinois were able to shave the device’s thickness to 1/30th of the (already quite thin) biostamp. That super thin profile means it conforms even better to the contours of human hide and makes it shower- and swim-proof during the two weeks it lasts before being naturally exfoliated with your skin.

For those unfamiliar with what the biostamp does, it’s a mesh of circuits and sensors that can record electrophysiological data like skin temperature and hydration state of the wearer. The new biostamp won’t be in your doctor’s tool box any time soon, however, as Rogers and his team are still refining the wireless power and communication technologies it leverages. Of course, once those problems are solved, there’s a good chance we’ll see MC10 turning it into a commercial product.

Filed under: Science

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Via: The Verge

Source: MIT Technology Review

Although there’s undoubtedly been improvements to low light videography, it’s still difficult or impossible for most cameras to record in near-total darkness. Canon has the solution with a video-only, 35mm CMOS sensor that can keep recording even when there’s virtually no visible light at all. The prototype’s pixels are about 7.5 times larger than in already light-sensitive DSLRs like the EOS-1D X, letting it get focus with as little as 0.03lux of illumination. The result is more than just the perfect camera for a horror movie — the sensor can capture the Geminid meteor shower and other astronomical phenomena without special tricks. Canon hasn’t said when it might ship a video camera toting the new imaging technology, but it’s planning to show the sensor at a security expo this week; we may well see the sensor in the field, even if most of its work happens beyond the public eye.

Filed under: Cameras, Canon

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Via: Impress Watch (translated)

Source: Canon (translated)

Militaries want soldiers to carry an increasing amount of tech on to the battlefield, but that isn’t necessarily convenient — or comfortable. MIT and the US Army have started early work on uniforms with fiberoptic sensors that would alleviate much of that burden. By weaving in microfibers cut from a mix of specialized, fluidized materials, the partnership can build data links that cover the entire body without breaking or adding significant bulk. They could serve as basic elements of a communication system, but MIT has broader ambitions: the sensors could track wounds through heat signatures, and just might prevent friendly fire incidents by sending a don’t-shoot signal when targeted with a laser sight. The fibers still have to get much thinner before the Army can offer smart uniforms as standard issue, but the wearable tech may keep soldiers nimble and, just possibly, save a few lives.

Filed under: Wearables

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Via: Wired

Source: MIT