KEECKER: The World's First HomePod

A new project on Kickstarter has gotten a lot of attention, it's the KEECKER, billed as The World's First HomePod, a rolling egg-looking robot that moves from room to room in a person's house, bringing personal entertainment functionality with it.

The idea is that instead of having music players, television sets, etc. in multiple rooms, have just one that can be summoned to wherever you want.


KEECKER is white and looks like a giant egg (a little less than knee high) with just a camera, lamp, microphone and a button mounted on it.

It's very plain looking, but offers a wide variety of entertainment options. It receives commands via smartphone (iOS or Android). It also comes with some smarts.

When brought home it moves around the house creating a map (with assistance from the new owner) learning which room is which by name so that when summoned, it knows which room to come to.

Pierre Lebeau

Once it arrives, KEECKER can play music or broadcast a video (or artistic renderings such as the moving galaxy) on a wall, browse the web or serve as a gaming unit.

It can also be used for video conferencing courtesy of a built in 360° camera and microphone, and because it runs on Android, it can run any Android app.

As if that weren't' enough, it can also be used as a sentry (or pet sitter) constantly monitoring the home (movement, temperature, CO2 and noise levels) while everyone is away.

KEECKER has motion sensors, WiFi, audio/video, an adjustable projection lamp, a processor (a quadcore mobile chip),

1 terabyte of local storage and a battery that can go for several days between recharging. Its makers promise that it's also quiet and doesn't get hot.

They also plan to release both an SDK and API in the near future and promise that it won't operate like Roomba, constantly running into walls to learn of its limitations. Instead, the robot will lean more the longer it "lives" in a home, and has software that prevents it from running into things.

It's not difficult to see the usefulness of KEECKER, if you're working in the kitchen, you could call your little robot to offer up a recipe, or provide music as you cook.

Likewise, it could be summoned to other areas, such as the bathroom or other parts of the house where traditional electronic devices don't exist.

On the down side, it clearly wouldn't work if there are stairs and may have trouble navigating cluttered environments.

Initial prices for KEECKER range from $3000 to $4000, depending on configuration.

Toshiba Glass on show at CEATAC 2014 Japan

Toshiba plans to introduce its own brand of smart glasses called Toshiba Glass, part of the peeks, prototypes and general buzz events at Ceatec in Japan.

Toshiba Glass is to feature tiny prisms etched into the lenses.

Matt Hill, writing in Gizmodo, referred to the smart glass entry as "the new kid on the block," targeted for release next year.

Tim Stevens of CNET called out the contrasts between Toshiba Glass and Google Glass, saying Toshiba's entry has fewer features, including the lack of camera.

"More significantly, Toshiba Glass must remain physically tethered to a smartphone to work, as it lacks a battery or processing power of its own."

John Anon in AndroidHeadlines also called out differences. "The main difference with Toshiba's Glass is that it does not contain the typical Google prism, the small additional window attached which does provide the user experience."

James Niccolai of the IDG News Service talked about how this works, saying "unlike Google Glass, Toshiba's glasses don't have a prism over the lens to reflect the image into the eye. 

Instead, with Toshiba's product, the glasses lens itself comprises a series of narrow, vertical prisms.

They're pretty much invisible when you look straight through the lens, but an image projected from an angle reflects back into the eye."

Anon commented that "With both the lack of the glasses independence and the limited ability to project information and images Toshiba's offering is unlikely to offer anywhere near the experience provided by Google," he remarked.

At the same time, Anon said Toshiba Glass could find its place in the smart glass market. He said "It is far more likely that Toshiba's version will be more price-relevant to the general public" and, practically speaking, may serve the purpose of use as a tool for instructional purposes.

The Nikkei Asian Review article about Toshiba Glass said it will be promoted "for such everyday applications as reading recipes in the kitchen."

IDG's Niccolai also noted it would be easy to imagine an industrial use case, such as giving an engineer instructions to repair something, so they can still have both hands on the job.

Toshiba hopes to start shipping their glass product next year; the frames are expected to be launched in three styles – standard, sporty and industrial.

Prototype Robot With Smartphone to Test 3-D Mapping, Navigation Inside Space Station

Credit: NASA/Ames

Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus spacecraft will carry 3,293 pounds (1,493.8 kg) of cargo on its upcoming commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station, including crew supplies, nanosatellites, student research and this prototype free-flying space robot equipped with a smartphone, known as Smart SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient Experimental Satellites).

NASA has been testing SPHERES on the space station since 2011. This summer, astronauts will upgrade these existing space robots to use Google’s "Project Tango" smartphone, which features a custom 3-D sensor and multiple cameras.

NASA will then use the Smart SPHERES to test free-flying 3-D mapping and navigation inside the space station.

NASA is developing the Smart SPHERES to perform work on the space station that requires mobile sensing, such as environmental surveys to monitor levels of radiation, lighting and air quality.

They also will be used to monitor inventory and conduct experiments. The development and testing of Smart SPHERES is funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The Copenhagen Wheel - Smartphone linked Electric bicycle technology

Superpedestrian, a Cambridge-based start-up, started making the Copenhagen Wheel available for preorders on Tuesday.

According to the company, shipping begins spring 2014. For those following the development of the Copenhagen Wheel, this is news, as the wheel, which is designed to turn ordinary bicycles into smart electric hybrids, first made its debut in 2009 at the UN Climate Change Conference.

A key feature of the device is that it can compensate with additional power whenever needed.

Riding with the Copenhagen Wheel in place, the user can capture the energy dissipated while braking and cycling and save it for times when a boost is needed.

The device is powered by a removable 48-volt lithium battery. The battery charge time is four hours, according to the site.

The device is offered in 26-inch bicycle wheel size but the company said it plans to add more wheel sizes in future releases.

The company also said that, while presently selling only the wheel, it will soon sell both the wheel and bikes already equipped with the Copenhagen Wheel.

All actuation of the wheel is automatic by way of the pedals, through sensing and control algorithms.

When the rider pedals harder, such as when going uphill, the Copenhagen Wheel pushes with increasing power.

The product gets especially interesting when used along with a smartphone though the wheel can work without a phone.

With the phone, the Copenhagen Wheel becomes a personal trainer with feedback on exercise goals and fitness, and as a reporter, telling the user about traffic congestion and pollution levels.

The company uses a Bluetooth 4.0 wireless protocol.

The "earlybird" price is listed as $699.

Smartphone Photos From Earth Orbit

These images of Earth were reconstructed from photos taken by three smartphones in orbit, or "PhoneSats." 

The trio of PhoneSats launched on April 21, 2013, aboard the Antares rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility and ended a successful mission on April 27. 

The ultimate goal of the PhoneSat mission was to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics for a satellite in space.

During their time in orbit, the three miniature satellites used their smartphone cameras to take pictures of Earth and transmitted these "image-data packets" to multiple ground stations. 

Every packet held a small piece of the big picture. As the data became available, the PhoneSat Team and multiple amateur radio operators around the world collaborated to piece together photographs from the tiny data packets.

The PhoneSat project is a technology demonstration mission funded by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters and the Engineering Directorate at NASA Ames Research Center. 

The project started in summer 2009 as a student-led collaborative project between Ames and the International Space University, Strasbourg.

› Read more

Images Credit: NASA Ames

E.Coli: UCLA Engineers create cell phone-based sensor

Researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new cell phone–based fluorescent imaging and sensing platform that can detect the presence of the bacterium Escherichia coli in food and water.

The engineers combined antibody functionalized glass capillaries with quantum dots (semiconductors often used for medical imaging) as signal reporters to specifically detect E. coli particles in liquid samples using a lightweight, compact attachment to an existing cell-phone camera.

The cost-effective cell-phone attachment acts as a florescent microscope, quantifying the emitted light from each capillary after the specific capture of E. coli particles within a sample.

By quantifying the florescent light emission from each tube, the concentration of E. coli in the sample can be determined.

E. coli can easily contaminate food and drinking water. It poses a significant threat to public health, even in highly developed parts of the world, and causes a large number of hospitalizations and deaths every year.

As few as 10–100 E. coli particles can kill the cells of the intestinal lining, destroy the kidneys and cause blood clots in the brain, as well as seizures, paralysis and respiratory failure.

This study illustrates the promising potential of a cell phone–enabled, field-portable and cost-effective E. coli detection platform for the screening of both water and food samples.

Authors of the research include UCLA electrical engineering postdoctoral scholar Hongying Zhu; UCLA electrical engineering undergraduate student Uzair Sikora; and UCLA associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering Aydogan Ozcan. Ozcan is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

More information: The research is published in the peer-reviewed journal The Royal Society of Chemistry and is available online at RSC Publishing

BrailleTouch App: Helps blind to send text messages

Researchers at Georgia Tech produced the app - to be made available on Apple and Android devices - based on the Braille writing system.

It is claimed typing with the app is up to six times faster than existing methods for texting without sight.

Access to technology for the visually-impaired is a growing issue due to the proliferation of touchscreens.

Experts say currently available tools, such as Apple's Voiceover technology, are functional but too slow to be used effectively.

Brailletouch, which the team hope to release in the next couple of weeks, uses a system that is controlled with six fingers and, crucially, does not require any movement of the hands.

"Users who know how to type Braille well never move their hands," explained Mario Romero, lead researcher on the project.

"When users hold the phone they hold the phone with the screen facing away from them in landscape mode.

"They wrap the index, middle and ring finger in each hand around the phone.

"It's not like the Qwerty keyboard where you move up and down. That's why this thing works - we can get away with only six keys."

"This is not for texting and driving” Mario Romero Lead researcher

Eyes-free kit

Brailletouch will be free and open-source, its makers say, and it is hoped it could even become an "eyes-free" solution for fully-sighted people who want to text while visually pre-occupied with something else.

"Learning to type Braille is learning to memorise where the the dots fall," Mr Romero said.

"It took me and my colleagues a few hours to memorise things so we could start typing at around 10 words per minute. It's not something that takes years.

"We're hoping that, if not Braille, a similar system may solve the issue of having too many keys that are too small that force everybody to look at the screen when they're typing."

However, Mr Romero was quick to dampen any possible hopes that the software could be used to text while behind the wheel.

"They need to concentrate on what they're doing. This is not for texting and driving," he said.

'Truly blind'
Mr Romero highlighted a growing anxiety shared among the blind community that the widespread adoption of touchscreens for many machines and devices is making them "truly blind".

"There is extreme concern about this new trend.

"A lot of equipment today - from copying machines to machines at the gym - is all coming with touch screens."

He added that while research into tactile screens, which give users feedback by moulding, is taking place, we are still some way from having touchscreens which adequately cater for the visually-impaired.

"Blind people say I 'see' things with my fingers," Mr Romero said.

"But on touchscreens they are truly blind."

Prosthetic Limb With An Embedded Smartphone Dock Built In

Trevor Prideaux was having trouble texting. Prideaux, who was born without his left forearm, used to have to balance his smartphone on his prosthetic arm or lay it on a flat surface to text, dial, or otherwise take advantage of the technology.


So with some help form the Exeter Mobility Center in Devon, UK, the 50-year-old Prideaux has become the first person to have a smartphone dock embedded in his prosthetic limb.

With some design help from Nokia and the prosthetics team at EMC, Prideaux’s Nokia C7 is now fixed within his prosthetic forearm (he went to Apple first hoping to mount an iPhone, but Cupertino declined to participate in his project).


He can now easily text by using his one hand, or field calls either by putting his prosthetic forearm up to his ear or by using speakerphone, leaving his biological limb free.

The very idea of it gets the idea mill churning. Right now, the prosthesis is a prosthesis and the phone is simply a phone, but the idea of integrating the two opens the door to some unique possibilities.

Aside from being able to record data on how the limb is used to help designers better customize the prosthesis to the person, the limb could also be augmented to make better use of the phone/computer.

Maybe some extra battery on board the limb? Some speakers for better speaker phone usage (and for the wearer’s listening pleasure, should he or she require some tunes).

Call it primitive cyborg tech with a lot of potential.

Apple iPhone 4S: Using Russian Glonass GPS

The secret is out and making Russia proud: pop culture and geek tech icon Apple has picked Russia's Glonass navigation system to run alongside GPS in its iPhone 4S models that hit stores this month.

The news was not exactly hidden by the California-based firm. A scan through the iPhone "specs" page on the Apple website shows Glonass sitting conspicuously next to GPS in the global positioning column.

But the news has created a sensation on the Russian Internet and made the front page of the respected Vedomosti business daily on Thursday.

"If the iPhone 4S really does have Glonass navigation," the paper said in a disbelieving tone, "this would be the first time the Russian system reached the world market."

It then quoted a company spokesman as saying that the phones became 50 percent more reliable with the Russian invention on board.

Vedomosti said basic Glonass documentation has the same open access as GPS. The basic global positioning system is also being honed for more precise military use not available to consumers.

The Glonass system has struggled through many delays and cost overruns that was additionally hurt last year by the loss of three satellites in a botched launch.

Glonass is less precise than its rival but relies on a different set of satellites that could work in some cities where the US system is less effective.

Mobile app diagnoses malaria from a single drop of blood

The virtual ink had barely dried on our story about the Skin Scan app for diagnosing melanoma when we received word of another, equally compelling mobile diagnostic tool.

Focusing this time on the millions of people at risk from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world, Lifelens is a project that has created a smartphone app to diagnose the insidious, mosquito-borne disease.

More than one million people die each year from Malaria, and roughly 85 percent of them are children under the age of 5, the Lifelens project notes. The most prevalent diagnostic tool, meanwhile, is the rapid diagnostic test (RDT), which is known to be associated with a 60 percent incidence rate of false positive results.

That, in turn, results in the treatment of many people who don’t actually have Malaria, driving up the costs of anti-Malaria treatment significantly. The Lifelens project, on the other hand, aims to make the process both cheaper and more accurate by analyzing blood digitally instead.

Specifically, once blood is stained to reveal the Malaria parasites, the project’s smartphone app can analyze a magnified image of a drop of blood captured via simple finger prick, including counting the various types of cells it includes. Malarial parasites are among those it can identify, making false results much less likely.

Once analysis is complete, data is uploaded to the Web, where it can be mapped for a high-level view of where Malaria outbreaks are occurring.

The video below demonstrates Lifelens in action:

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