If you missed this week’s SmartWorld Series, here’s your chance to catch up on the exciting developments happening in the connected world.

This week’s SmartWorld Series featured primped-up solar panels, an egg-shaped gadget to help you find your inner peace, a panoramic smart glass for luxury cars, and IBM’s new take on renewable energy sources.

Solar-Power Gets a Makeover + Smart Beds Prevent Pressure Pains

Solar panels can be an ugly addition to your beautiful home.  Thanks to Toronto artist Sarah Hall, solar panels have been given a new look as they are turned into art pieces that won’t stick out sorely in your beautiful home.  The stained-glass solar panels can replace your boring window panes to make you home stand out and have your personality reflected on these artistic glass.  They not only make your house look good, it also cuts down on your electric bill.

Read the full article here.

Gadgets + Apps for Fitness and Relaxation : Healthy Appetite for Growth

The PIP is a small gadget that comes in various colors that is reminiscent of the 90’s Tamagotchi craze.  This little egg-shaped device measures your stress level and together with its companion mobile games, it would help you find your inner peace.

Also featured is the Misfit Shine, a small, quarter-sized, aluminum-encased gadget that uses a high precision 3-axis accelerometer to track your activities such as walking, jogging, running, biking, swimming and sleeping.  It uses CR2032 battery which means you don’t have to charge the device as the battery last to up to four months.  After that, you can just change the battery — it comes with a replacement kit.

There’s an accompanying iOS app to help you make sense of all the data collected by Shine, as well as help you achieve your fitness goal.

Read the full article here.

Smart Cars Take the Scenic Route : Benz’s Smart Glass + Highways that Charge

Mercedes Benz will soon offer an option for customers to add Magic Sky Control on their new luxury sedans.  With the use of Research Frontiers’ patented SPD-SmartGlass technology, sunroofs have made smarter.  With a simple touch of a button, the glass goes from tinted to clear and both modes effectively blocks UV and infrared rays keeping the cabin cooler and protecting the passengers from the sun’s harmful rays.

Ford Motor Company is also incorporating more tech into their vehicles, opening up a playground for app makers anxious to make cars smarter.  Ford’s Silicon Valley Lab has a warehouse full of software developers learning how to create their own apps using Ford’s OpenXC, a combination of open source hardware and software that lets you extend your vehicle with custom applications and pluggable modules.

TJ Giuli, a researcher from Ford, stated that the company needed to “create a system that allows individuals to do something completely different than we ever would have thought of, or intended to do.”  And so OpenXC was created.

Read the full article here.

IBM’s New Take on Renewable Energy, and a Surgical Knife that Sniffs Out Cancer Cells

About 20-40 percent of renewable energy cannot be utilized because it is unstable, but that will soon change as IBM has come up with a system dubbed as the Hybrid Renewable Energy Forecasting or HyRef that uses cloud-imaging technology and cameras to track cloud movements and combine that data with information from sensors on wind turbines that tracks wind direction, temperature, and speed.

With the use of analytics technology, “the data-assimilation based solution can produce accurate local weather forecasts within a wind farm as far as one month in advance, or in 15-minute increments.”  This system would allow utilities to rely more on renewable energy resources in the hopes of reducing carbon emissions while significantly improving clean energy output for consumers and businesses.

Read the full article here.

Tune in next week for more interesting stories, discoveries, and innovation in the world of smart and connected things.