Science knowledge

Saturday, 18 June 2016

A creepy robot sensor that watches you sleep

Mother is a peanut-shaped robotic sensor hub that watches over you and your family. It measures how well you brush your teeth, it knows how much you drink and it watches you when you sleep. The idea behind Mother is that you can have everything in your home constantly monitored. Affix a sensor to your door, and it's a door alarm. Put a sensor on your grandmother's pills, and it will tell you if grandma is taking her medications. Put it under your pillow, and your sleep habits get tracked.

That may or may not be something you're interested in. But man, is it creepy-looking.The aptly named KeyMouse is a split keyboard that fits your hands perfectly. Move around the two keyboard halves, and it becomes a mouse.

The KeyMouse folks thought of everything. It has a mouse button at your thumbs. There's a NumLock button on the left that lets you convert the letters to numbers on the right hand. There are a bunch of programmable buttons that pretty much do whatever you want them to do.

You pretty much never have to lift your fingers off the home keys using KeyMouse. But using it was a little tricky. The keys aren't exactly where you'd expect them to be, and my first few attempts at "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" came back a bit garbled.

KeyMouse founder Heber Allred said it takes about a week to get used to the $399 keyboard. But once you do, your typing speed improves dramatically.