This week’s Smart Health roundup features a new sensor hub algorithm for wearable tech, Salesforce’s wearable tech developer kit, and a ring that fuses fashion and tech.

QuickLogic’s new sensor hub algorithm for wearable tech

With the advent of wearable tech, device manufacturers (OEMs) are rushing to release their products out to market, all in hopes of beating the competition. Yet there’s still room for improvement when it comes to wearable technology, such as ease of use for mainstream consumers, and short battery life.  To help OEMs address these issues, QuickLogic Corporation, a company that innovates ultra-low-power programmable Customer Specific Standard Products (CSSPs), announced the launch of a new wearable-specific sensor hub gesture algorithms.

The algorithms include “Tap-to-Wake” and “Rotate-Wrist-To-Wake”, which enables wearable devices to respond to user movements and gestures without waking up the power-hungry host application processor or microcontroller, conserving the battery of the device.  The algorithms come standard in QuickLogic’s S1 Wearable Catalog CSSP sensor hub, and can also be implemented in the ArcticLink 3 S1 silicon platform using the company’s Integrated Development Environment either as a stand-alone or in conjunction with OEM or third-party algorithms.

Salesforce’s wearable tech devkit

Salesforce.com, the CRM and cloud giant, introduced the Salesforce Wear Developer Kit, a set of tools designed to help developers experiment with and build applications for a variety of popular wearable devices such as smartwatches, smartglasses, smart armbands, and biometric authenticators.

According to the company, the kit is just the first in a series of steps in its broader plan for wearable devices.  Daniel Debow, senior vice president of emerging technologies at Salesforce.com, states that the company eventually plans to setup open wearable-focused developer zones at its events and hold related “hackathons” as part of the initiative and could potentially release its own packaged wearable app or set of apps in the future.

“With Wear, we give businesses more options where they don’t have to worry about the ‘plumbing’,” says Daniel Debow, Salesforce senior vice president in an interview.

Early partners include  Fitbit, ARM, Philips and OMsignal. Salesforce released six sample apps for popular wearables including the Pebble smartwatch, Samsung Gear smartwatch, Google Glass, Android Wear platform, Thalmic Labs’ MYO armband, and Bionym’s Nymi biometric authentication band.

Ringly fuses fashion and tech

Forget about missed phone calls and important text messages, as wearing something as simple and fashionable as a ring can keep one on top of things.  Introducing Ringly – a gold-plated smart ring packed with an accelerometer, Bluetooth LE, motor, and LEDs.  It connects to a person’s smartphone via BLE and discreetly notifies the wearer of incoming calls and text messages with lights and vibrations.  Wearers can customize what notifications are pushed to the ring, so only important alerts earn the wearer’s immediate attention.

Those who love bling will appreciate Ringly’s use of semi-precious and precious gems, depending on the design.  And the first 1,000 rings sold will have a real diamond on the side of the ring, a shiny incentive to generate buzz for this new product.