At CES, wearables take on complex challenges
First there were fitness wearables. Then the focus turned to fashionable wearables. The latest evolution, seen throughout last week’s CES at the Las Vegas Convention Center: more functional, futuristic — and sometimes farfetched — wearables.
Wrist-worn wearables were a huge hit at the annual trade show four years ago, as tech makers showed off fitness trackers and smartwatches that monitored steps taken, stairs climbed and calories burned. The technology went on to become enormously popular among consumers, with an estimated 310 million wearable devices sold worldwide last year.
Now, some wearables are moving away from the wrist and becoming smaller and smarter.
“We’re seeing lots of not obvious usage scenarios, but once you start to really think about it, it makes perfect sense,” Brian Blau, research vice president for personal technologies at market research firm Gartner, said in an interview from CES, which ended Friday.
One of the products generating the most buzz at this year’s show was L’oreal’s UV Sense, a wearable electronic UV sensor affixed to a user’s thumbnail. The small, battery-free dot — 9 millimeters in diameter and less than 2 millimeters thick — measures individual UV exposure and is designed to be worn for up to two weeks. It can store up to three months of data.
The beauty giant said it was tapping into the increasing popularity of nail art as well as consumers’ concerns over the harmful effects of sun exposure. Calling the combination “beauty tech,” Guive Balooch, head of L’oreal’s Technology Incubator, said the company wanted its wearables to be simple and “livable.”
“The perception of wearables is they’re clunky, expensive, require lots of charging,” he said. “We need to make them affordable, agile and designed in a way that can be worn in many places.”
Modius, another wearables startup at CES, designed a headset that is hardly
1868 - 1963 W.E.B. Du Bois Sociologist and historian
His full name was William Edward Burghardt Dubois, and when he died at 95, The Times characterized him as “a monumental and often controversial” leader of black thought who “frequently disagreed not only with whites but with members of his own race.” He was a founder of the NA ACP and edited its newspaper, The Crisis, until he broke with the organization in 1934. He envisioned grooming a “talented 10th” black intellectual elite that would lead a self-sufficient black society. He was a consultant to the United Nations, joined the Communist Party and left his home in Brooklyn several years before he died and moved to Ghana to direct the Ency-