Top TechTop Tech #62: Bionics eye, sounder sleep, smart mirror
Promising products and interesting innovations
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Bionic eye implant to beat 20/20
• Track your sleep for sounder snooze
• Smart mirrors boost sales
Bionic eye implant to beat 20/20
A promising new method of improving eyesight involves a bionic device that goes a contact one better: it permanently replaces the lens nature gave you, and in return gives you even better than 20/20 vision.
Occumetrics says it’s testing its bionic eye now in clinical trials. The intraocular lens “is capable of restoring quality vision at all distances, without glasses, contact lenses or corneal refractive procedures, and without the vision problems that have plagued current accommodative and multifocal intraocular lens designs.”
It’s constructed of inert biocompatible polymeric materials “that do not cause adverse biophysical changes within the eye,” the Canadian company says. Pricing might be around $3,000 per eye.
Here’s more information from the company.
The Canadian Press has more info here.
Track your sleep for sounder snooze
San Francisco-based Hello says its $129 Sense module “sits on your bedside table and combines the insight of your sleep patterns with the data of the environment in your bedroom, including noise, light, temperature, humidity and particles in the air. When you know what helps or hinders your sleep, you can fix it.” It works with the included Sleep Pill device that attaches to your pillow “and invisibly tracks your sleep at night.”
The company says “Sense knows when you’re falling asleep, soundly asleep, thrashing about, or waking up.” The Pill has a accelerometer and gyroscope; the module has a microphone to pick up on snoring, sleep talking and noise disturbances in the night; an ambient light sensor; temperature and humidity sensors; and even a particulate sensor that can “spot the tiniest of things floating around in the air, so tiny you can’t even see most of them.”
The device is reviewed (favorably) here.
Smart mirrors boost sales
“It’s the future of social shopping.” MemoMi Labs says it provides the first “high-fidelity, true-vision digital imaging software platform” that delivers “an adaptive and controlled camera perspective.”
The result: a mirror that shows you what a shirt or hairstyle will look like on you without requiring you personally make a change — and improved sales, according to some tests.
The “smart mirrors” combine a camera and screen and perform perspective correction “from every angle and distance in real time,” the company says. “delivering a distortion-free, realistic image with true eye-to-eye contact.”
Upscale retailers such as Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom are testing “this high-tech fitting room,” PhysOrg reports here.
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