Nowadays, wearables are much more than just wristbands.
Technology for your wrist
A growing number of devices, including headphones and rings, monitor our movements and health. Now, researchers at MIT have devised a way to use carpets to monitor people without the need for privacy-invading cameras. These surveillance gadgets stretch the meaning of “wearable” to include technology outside the body.
“Today, consumers have technology at their disposal to track virtually every aspect of their lives—sleep, exercise, nutrition—giving them access to information about their physical health anytime, anywhere (or, in this case, on their wrist),” Ramses Alcaide, CEO of Neurable, a company that develops smart headphones, said in an email interview.
The MIT researchers built a carpet of commercial pressure-sensitive film and conductive thread, containing more than 9,000 sensors, according to a recently published paper. Each of the sensors converts a person’s pressure into an electrical signal through the physical contact between their feet, limbs, torso and the carpet.
