This week’s SmartBody roundup features: comfy pajamas to help put your kids to bed, a bra that beats mammograms in detecting cancer, and one ring to rule them all.

Smart PJs

Kids love a good bedtime story but parents can sometimes be stuck in repeat, reading or telling the same old story because they can’t remember the old bedtime stories from when they were kids or they can’t find the kids’ story books.

But soon, all a parent will need is a pair of Smart PJs, a smartphone and an app to keep their bedtime stories interesting.  Smart PJs are available for both boys and girls, but the design basically looks the same with only the color of the collar being different.  The design of the PJs are the same, either clusters or blued and green dots scattered throughout the item of clothing.  The dots aren’t just dots however as they actually form codes.  When scanned with a smartphone app, these bring up a variety of bedtime stories.  Which means that choosing stories will be a whole lot more fun for kids and parents, who will never run out of stories to tell.

The technology may remind you of something like QR codes, and it should, because that’s where Juan Murdoch, the creator of the Smart PJs got the idea.  But although the PJs work like QR codes, Murdoch’s team had to create their own code to make them work.  Smart PJs are available for $25 and the app can be downloaded for free.

Smart Bra aids in early detection of breast cancer

If you’re a woman who’s previously experienced getting a mammogram, you’d know that it’s very unpleasant since it basically squeezes out the life of your lovely lady jugs.  Aside from it being unbelievably painful, it exposes women to radiation, and although it’s only a minute amount, it’s still not nice knowing you’ve been exposed to it. For this reason, some women avoid having their breasts checked simply because they don’t want to go through with this kind of treatment.

Now, there’s an easier way for women to know if they are at risk for breast cancer and it comes in a form that women are very familiar with: the Smart Bra.

Dubbed as the First Warning System, the Smart Bra is packed with 16 small sensors that monitor heat patterns and the shape of your breasts to determine if there’s any change in temperature caused by the growth of blood vessels.  The information collected by the sensors is then compared to bioinformatic profiles of cancerous tissues that allows the company to deliver a detection alert with up to 90 percent accuracy.  This is not a diagnostic tool, it won’t tell you that you definitely have breast cancer or not. What it is, is a screening tool that identifies changes that could potentially help in the early detection of breast cancer.

A ring to rule them all

Right now there are apps and gadgets that connect your home appliances to the internet and allow you to control them with the use of a smartphone app.  Now, there’s a device that would allow you to do most of that controlling with the use of a simple ring.

The NFC Ring started as a Kickstarter project, and was able to raise more than £240,000 despite having a funding goal of just £30,000. So what’s the purpose of the ring?  It’s designed to unlock phones, doors, transfer files and even connect people.

As the name states, the ring uses Near Field Communication to transfer or connect over a short range.  It doesn’t have a battery, all it has is two sides – one for public information, one for private data.  You can program the private side to unlock your phone and your NFC-enabled doors, and the public side to share information quickly with friends on their NFC-enabled device.  Its functions are highly customizable since the software used in the ring is open source,  which means you can use it for any purpose you wish, such as quickly sharing data with friends and launching apps when you tap on your NFC-enabled device.

The keyword here is NFC, so if you don’t have any NFC devices, this ring will do you no good. But with many new devices already coming with NFC chips, finding compatible smart objects for your won’t be too hard.  The style of the rings looks minimalist but also quite stylish, so wearing it everyday will not be an issue.

 
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