Intel ‘Make it Wearable’ Challenge Teams Innovate on Wearables to Address Health, Safety and Well-Being

Make it Wearable is a global initiative that was announced by Intel at CES 2014 to inspire new concepts, fuel innovation and evolve personal computing in exciting new ways. The Challenge is part of Intel’s broader goals to extend the company’s reach into new areas and imagine futuristic technologies that will impact our everyday lives.

BABYBE (Chile) and BabyGuard (China) are two entries in the Intel “Make it Wearable” challenge that address the health and safety of babies and mothers. BABYBE connects babies in the NICU with their mothers by sharing the mother’s heart beat and biorhythms to the baby in real time. BabyGuard monitors the health of the expectant mother and her baby to provide real-time information between doctor visits.

After visiting several hospitals around the world, the BABYBE team identified an opportunity for technology to step in and considerably improve a pre-term newborn’s life by strengthening the bond between mother and child.

For pre-term infants who are restricted to incubators, physical contact with parents is essential to encourage natural biological development and bonding, but this is often not possible. BABYBE helps bridge the gap and aims to keep parents and babies connect during the baby’s time in the incubator.

The bionic mattress brings haptic information from the mother to the baby in real time. BABYBE has already passed several extensive clinical tests with tremendous results. The current solution, Kangaroo Mother Care, mimics the way adults hold their babies skin-to-skin on their belly, but due to medical and/or social reasons, this method is unfortunately only viable in one out of five cases.

First V1sion

First V1sion is a wearable ‘player perspective’ broadcast system that allows the athlete’s point of view to be shown for spectators. The First V1sion team is an entrepreneurial group that was inspired by their collective excitement about experiencing their favorite sport from the player’s perspective. They wanted to step into their idols’ shoes, similar to the experience already enabled in motor racing and Formula 1 where you are able to enjoy the driver’s perspective via helmet and onboard cameras.

The First V1sion team tested the product with a professional soccer player from Liga BBVA, a Spanish football league, and applied the learnings to create a device for sports like soccer, basketball or tennis. It uses Intel® Edison and integrates a camera and RF transmitter designed to be in contact with the human body in order to enable fans to experience their favorite sport from the player’s perspective.

For sports enthusiasts, First V1sion (Spain) is a broadcast system that allows the player’s point of view to be shown in sports. And Snowcookie (Poland) monitors user’s’ kinetics and physiology and crowd sources ski data to enhance safety, improve technique and connect winter sports enthusiasts.

The Arc Pendant

Lastly, the Arc Pendant is a smart pendant that guides using directional haptic or touch feedback, understands voice commands and monitors the body.

Arc Pendant: Already improving navigation safety and simplicity, Arc Pendant will infiltrate the home, fitness center and roads.

After years of struggling to efficiently navigate London on his bike, team member Tom Shrive realized there had to be a better way to traverse the streets without having to constantly check GPS on one’s phone. Teaming up with several friends, including a data scientist and product development specialist, he founded Arc Wearables with the goal of creating a non-visual, non-audio navigation tool and voice activation system.

Arc Pendant, a discrete sports and activity necklace, monitors information from the body through vibrations and relays it back to the user with touch sensors to provide a safer, more seamless way to get around.