PilotAngel and the Newest Wearables

One of the winners at the AT&T Hackathon, PilotAngel, made interesting use of an interesting wearable: the Neurosky Mindwave sensor.

It just looks like a little-bit-heavyweight headset:

But it allows your brainwaves to be digitally monitored and reordered.

Most of the applications available on the actual web-site appear to be self-experimental: attempting to get yourself into the meditation zone, or something like that.

But at the Hackathon, several real-world applications of interest were seen. One of these was Pilot Angel. 

The idea is, that if the operator of a vehicle starts entering into sleep brain-wave patterns then an alert goes out, which if unresponded to, gets escalated to a supervisor. It's kind of amazing that such things are rapidly leaving science-fiction and entering the realm of actual technology.

From their presentation:

It's time to stop the catastrophes seen in the news with ships, airlines, trains. Often this is not negligence but loss of focus and “Highway Hypnosis”.

  T

eam "

Pilot Angel" 

created

  a functioning proof of concept at the AT&T DevSummit hackathon

 

for CES 2014 u

sing 

• Neurosky Mindwave sensors
  ,
    
• a Nokia Windows Phone app,
   
• a pebble smart watch
   

they monitored and analyzed pilot’s brain waves in real-time,  detecting

 

loss of

 focus and  triggering awareness-boosting lighting using Philips Hue lights and text-messaging & Pebble watch alerts to the pilot and their supervisors along with GPS location data. PilotAngel is looking to make the proof of concept a reality

 and create a start up. 

Pilot Angel

 is open to team up with various partners and angel investors.

Read more about this and a few other wearables here.  And you can see the demo here:

I hope that Pilot Angel -- a team that had my vote -- goes forward with their idea. I think it's important for hackathon winners to take their ideas as far as they can.

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO

Swag and Sewing Machines

Pictured above is only a tiny sampling of the thousands of dollars worth of Swag: induction mats for telephones, headphones, brain-wave sensors, smart-watches, and all kinds of other sensors and cool gadgets had to be given away to the developers at the AT&T Developer Summit Hackathon.

It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.

TheHackerCIO is willing ....

But it's amazingly tiring: we spent nearly three hours listening to "lightening talks" and pre-qualifying them for the hardware give-aways. The contestants had to "show connection", as the lawyers call it, between what they were developing and the hardware. It wasn't enough to say, "I'm kind of developing something that sort of helps out in some nebulous, undefined way." When we got those, we had to turn the contestants away.

They need to firm up their concept. The Swag is there to support the development effort. Anything left over, would be given away, of course. And some judges were easier going than others. TheHackerCIO was pretty easy. There was another pre-qualifier who was a real bad-ass.

This Hackathon is centered around wearable technology. Sometimes you have to see this kind of thing to catch the vision. Or at least it's much easier. It always seemed toy-like to me, before. But now, I'm starting to get it.

At first, I was startled to see this machine at a Hackathon:

But if you're doing wearable technology, it makes perfect sense.

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO