We round up the connected tech from CES
CES 2024 has now come to a close, and we need a well-earned rest after a week of chasing down wearables across downtown Las Vegas.
Highlights were the Movano Evie, new Garmin Lily 2, and some promising consumer smart glasses.
But the halls of the Expo were full of interesting wearables, far too many to report individually.
Read on for some of the wearables you might have missed from this year’s show.
Vuzix Ultralite S
A follow-up to the Ultralite and new for CES 2024, the sportier-looking Ultralite S also features an incognito mode so people can’t see the text or visuals through the front of the smartglasses.
Vuzix is still focused on the enterprise market, although Ultralite is an OEM product that companies could use as the basis of consumer products.
We got to try the Ultralite S on the show floor and had a variety of demos including turn-by-turn directions, text-to-speech, and translations.
The Ultralite S is seriously impressive in terms of the form factor, but still very basic in the quality of the heads-up display visuals. It’s also quite hard to focus on the text, and I closed one eye to read long passages of text.
Pete Jameson, COO of Vuzix revealed to Wareable that it was working on a microLED solution that would be a “game changer” for smart eyewear – which was still “a year and a half” away.
Sennheiser Momentum Sport
Sennheiser announced the Momentum Sport, a brand new pair of heart rate monitoring headphones, which use Polar algorithms to track your workout performance.
The Powered By Polar device features an optical heart rate sensor, and temperature sensor and broadcasts over Bluetooth, so it can be used by Pelotons, smartwatches and your smartphone.
But you can plug them into Polar Flow, and get performance analytics such as Training Load Pro, Training Benefit, and even body temperature measurements.
Stelo by Dexcom
With Abbott getting into consumer CGMs with Lingo, it’s no surprise that Dexcom has its product coming too. It’s launched Stelo, a pared-back version of its G7 CGM, which is designed for Type 2 diabetics to understand their glucose levels. The app will track spikes and provide insights into the foods that cause high blood sugar.
NextSense earbuds
The NextSense project was born out of Google X, which certainly caught our eye – and it’s led to two different products. The original project was a pair of EEG earbuds designed to offer an early warning for epileptic seizures.
That will be a few years away, but the same technology is being used for the NextSense sleep earbuds.
The same EEG tech will read your brain evaluate your sleep strategies, and enable users to work out the best way to get decent sleep. The EEG can power sleep sounds and soundscapes but also inform users about the effectiveness of treatments such as melatonin.
It’s set to launch at the end of 2024.
Invoxia Minitailz
This pet tracker is a GPS tracker for dogs and cats – that also acts as a fitness tracker and wellness monitor. It tracks heart rate, will detect Afib, and also uses AI to warn if your pet’s behaviour is changing. It can be retrofitted to your pet’s existing collar.
Amira Terra
This menopause wearable will detect hot flashes from the wrist and track them within the partner app. There’s also a cooling element, which uses cold water to chill a pad, which can be placed on a bed or seat to cool the body until the feeling passes and aid in better sleep.
IdentifyHer
Irish startup IdentityHer uses a stick-on sensor to track the symptoms of menopause. The sensor sticks to the chest, and tracks key menopausal symptoms, without the need for self-reporting.
The mix of sensors will track temperature, hot flashes, anxiety, and sleep. With so little research into menopause, IdentifyHer aims to help women manage their symptoms, and assess the effectiveness of treatment packages faster.
MindLink Air
These eye-tracking glasses from Canadian start-up AdHawk are designed to track the health of the brain.
Capturing eye movements, the Mindlink Air glasses will record eye behavior and movement, blink activity, pupil dilation, gaze behavior, fixation depth, and fixation depth.
Via the app, Mindlink will report on mental focus, and cognitive load and even assess your reading speed.
Benzamin AI sleep controller
This South Korean startup puts a sensor under your mattress to detect vital signs during sleep.
That might not sound particularly innovative, but there’s more than meets the eye.
As well as detecting heart rate, breathing rate, and other metrics via vibrations through the mattress, it will also vibrate back, syncing to your heart rate, which it claims can boost autonomic system activity by 146% and parasympathetic nervous system activity by 116%.
What does all that mean? Better sleep – but only if you live in South Korea because that’s where it’s launching first.
ErgoSportive smart bed
This connected bed base turns your existing mattress into a smart bed and can hook up to your Garmin smartwatch. The bed base can track heart rate and respiration rate, tracking your sleep in real-time and manipulating the mattress to aid your rest. Examples could include lifting the mattress under the head if you’re snoring.
Interestingly, the bed is part of the Garmin Connectable program. That means it will populate Garmin Connect with sleep metrics if you don’t want to wear your smartwatch to bed.