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If data from personal biometric devices is ever going to be truly useful to researchers, big medical centers will have to pull it into electronic health records (EHRs), de-identify it, and make it public. Without the medical data found in EHRs, like CT scans, X-rays, and blood tests, researchers have little context for wearable sensor data and there is little useful information that can be gleaned from just the raw data

Practice Fusion, a popular EHR company, will begin opening up its API over the next year to pull in data from wearable sensors to its platform.

Basis, a startup that makes a health sensor-laden watch, is working on the first step: a device-agnostic platform that puts all of a person’s health sensor data into a single online repository.

What makes this device very interesting is that it is extremely cheap to make. Replicating the human skin involves creating a device that can detect pressure, touch, proximity, temperature, humidity, flow, and pH levels all at the same time. In order to achieve this, one would expect that highly sophisticated sensors and circuits will be used. That does not happen to be the case. This team used common household items such as sticky notes, napkins, aluminum foils and sponges to create the paper skin. The whole device cost only $1,67 to make.

“My vision is to make electronics simple to understand and easy to assemble so that ordinary people can participate in innovation.”

Compared to various pricey sensors out there, the paper skin looks to be a good alternative with many potential applications. According to test results, it has already been seen that the paper skin performs on the same level as the more expensive sensors currently available.

Next up will be all kinds of 'devices' that will go in your body. This may be just under your skin, in your eye, swallowed or injected.

- Honda Motor plans to offer cars that can drive themselves on highways by around 2020

With Toyota Motor and Nissan Motor having announced their plans, the three largest domestic carmakers now have timelines for self-driving vehicles.

Honda this year started adopting what it calls Sensing technologies

A company has created a set of ears that apparently respond to the wearer’s emotions via a sensor on the forehead.

Netherlands first to establish nationwide Internet of Things network

Three initial projects give a sense of the scope and types of application that will make up the Internet of Things. At the port of Rotterdam, depth sounders have already been outfitted with sensors and network connections. An experiment at Utrecht will connect all railway switches so they can be monitored centrally. And at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, a major European hub busier than JFK and Miami International combined, tests with baggage handling are already underway. If you think of the number of pieces of luggage moving through the worlds sixth-busiest international airport you begin to get a sense of the scale of applications for IoT. If each piece of luggage has an IoT tag, nothing should be unaccounted for.

The term “enhancing underwear” might summon images of go-go-gadget pants that help you run faster and jump higher, but it actually refers to a new breed of briefs that promise you a bigger bulge. Push-up bras and “butt-lifters” have long been a staple of women’s lingerie aisles, but genital scaffolding has now spread to menswear. Featured in the V&A exhibition, the “Wonderjock” is the work of Australian company AussieBum and aims to do for men’s bits what the Wonderbra did for women’s busts – hoisting them up and thrusting them out.

US army researchers have developed smart underwear, with sensors secreted inside elastic waistbands that track heart rate, body temperature and perspiration, and beam the stats back to a central monitor. This “wear-and-forget” sensory system is also designed for stressful training situations, identifying which soldiers remain more balanced, so they can be picked for the harder missions.

Underwear is already a common place for smuggling drugs of the illegal variety, but a recent pharmaceutical innovation could soon make putting pills in your pants a legitimate activity. Swiss textile giant Schoeller has developed a fabric that administers drugs to the surface of your skin over time, and thinks the best place to put it is in your undies – as those are the garments you’re least likely to forget to put on.

Its latest purchase is Nest Labs, a maker of sophisticated thermostats and smoke detectors: on January 13th Google said it would pay $3.2 billion in cash for the firm. Google’s biggest move into hardware so far is its $12.5 billion bid for Motorola Mobility

With Google’s collection of hardware businesses, the common factor is data: gathering and crunching them, to make physical devices more intelligent.

Packed with sensors and software that can, say, detect that the house is empty and turn down the heating, Nest’s connected thermostats generate plenty of data, which the firm captures.

The popularity of wearable health trackers, such as Fitbit, Jawbone UP, and Nike FuelBand, have created a problem

Hardly anyone has developed algorithms that derive actionable insights from the data that your body generates, and the dashboards are separate

Samsung is not planning to release a wearable health monitor to consumers, but expects other developers to build on the reference design shown today.

The good news is that the citizens faced with this disaster reaped the benefits of enhanced mass communications and early warning systems -- clearly the power of the Internet being used for social good.

citizens already turn to social media for disaster updates to supplement traditional governmental and agency sources. Taken a step further, imagine an app that enables disaster victims and relief workers to view a shared map and see where all the rescue and aid efforts are situated in real time.

Technology is getting smaller, faster, cheaper and more powerful every day. With this phenomenon, sensors in almost everything become the norm -- in our cars, machinery and infrastructure. This evolution, paired with the power of cloud computing and big data analytics, makes it possible for both humans and inanimate objects to communicate valuable information.

Sproutling promises to use wearable, sensor-driven technology to give parents insight into their child's sleeping patterns. It does this with a wearable anklet, a charging dock with a novel UI, and an app

The app uses animations, not hard numbers, to provide an at-a-glance reassurance that your baby is alive and well ("New parents aren't going to know if 130 beats per minute is better than 90, and without the medical context to understand vitals data it's just going to cause more fear and anxiety and needless calls to the doctor,"

This generation of new parents are millennials. "They grew up with a smartphone in their pocket, so they're looking for technology to solve their problems,"

The 5 feet, 300 pound scooting robot is stacked with quite the resume of capabilities and because it delivers real-time data to a secure monitored location, it will minimize threats for human security officers that take on these dangerous jobs.

this venture gets some backing as security companies are looking for more innovative solutions to counter their turnover rates, some as high as 400%, Knightscope reports.

hese autonomous patrol units are doing the jobs that may be too dangerous for people and doing them better, backed with day and night 360-degree video capture, infrared and thermal scanning, proximity sensors, radar for real-time 3D mapping, and optical character recognition, allowing the K5 to never forget a face. Knightscope confirmed though that K5s are NOT intended to replace law enforcement, instead “to help and assist officers, improve response times and keep them out of harm’s way if possible.”

That robot you see being pushed around is the latest generation of Atlas, the insanely advanced humanoid robot as built by the Google-owned Boston Dynamics.

they’re hitting stuff out of Atlas’ hands and pushing him around to test its compensation systems. All that pushing and shoving only makes him stronger.

An average human made of metal instead of meat

Imagine a world where the narrative, background music, colour grading and general feel of a drama is shaped in real time to suit your personality.

Visual Perceptive Media is a film which changes based on the person who is watching the video. Rather than drawing on sensor data to profile the environment, it focuses on the user themselves. It uses profiled data from a phone application to build a profile of the user and their preferences via their music collection and some personality questions.

A new glove will turn even the most deficient in musical talent into rockstars.

The glove works in tandem with a motion sensor bracelet, allowing you to create sounds by moving your fingertips or your entire hand. You can tap any surface and it will sound like you're playing on a keyboard.

You can then record songs in real-time, on-the-go, and trust that they'll all be saved onto the app. The glove can send recordings over WiFi or Bluetooth.