This week’s Smart Living roundup features a smart new way of keeping roads safe, a smart jar to keep track of your kitchen ingredients and a smart electronic shower that helps you save water.

 .

Volvo teams up with transport admins to keep roads safe

Volvo Cars has teamed up with the Swedish Transport Administration and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration for a project to enable vehicles to share information regarding road friction, like icy patches, with other vehicles using a cloud-based network.

Road alerts will also be delivered to road administrators who can use the information to better plan and execute winter road maintenance and quickly address changing conditions. The project is testing 1000 vehicles in order to make the technology available to the general public in a few years time.

“The more information that can be shared on the road, the fewer surprises there are. And when you’re driving, surprises are what you most want to avoid,”says Erik Israelsson, Project Leader Cooperative ITS (Intelligent Transport System) at Volvo Cars. “In light of that, we’ve developed a slippery-road alert, which notifies drivers about icy patches and contributes to making winter road maintenance more efficient. We’re also adding a hazard-light alert, which will tell drivers if another vehicle in the area has its hazard lights on. With these first two features, we have a great platform for developing additional safety features. This is just the beginning.”

 .

Neo Smart Jar

If you’re looking for a way to keep track of the ingredients in your kitchen such as flour, sugar, salt, pepper, seasonings and other items used for cooking and baking, then the Neo Smart Jar may just be the thing.

Neo is a jar with an airtight lid, Bluetooth LE connectivity, sensors equipped on the detachable base, an LED light ring, wireless charging and is dishwasher safe. It connects to the Kitchen Cloud, a service to monitor jar levels, expiration dates and shopping lists. The cloud service also provides nutritional data and recipes, and can be synced with fitness devices for a holistic approach on health.

You can pre-order Neo on Indiegogo, and if you refer three of your friends to get the smart jar, you will get an additional smart jar for free.

 .

KOTT-SMART A shower display

Kottman Technologies developed an electronic shower display called the KOTT-SMART A which not only displays the water consumption during shower, but also determines the efficiency class resulting from this and motivates the consumer to save water.

The Swiss Federal Office of Energy has scientifically proven that KOTT-SMART A can reduce a household’s annual energy consumption by 440 kWh thermal energy use and 8500 liter drinking water and waste water.

To use KOTT-SMART A, you just need to attach the display to the shower hose and the integrated generator creates electricity from the water pressure which means it does need to be plugged in or a battery to operate. It also features Bluetooth LE allowing users to precisely monitor water consumption using an app on their smartphone and can be integrated with a wide range of smart home platforms such as KNX / KNX-RF, ZigBee, Z-Wave and enOcean.

photo credit: chiaralily via photopin cc