Smart earrings could replace smartwatches & they look stylish too
University of WashingtonThermal earrings are smart earrings designed to monitor your body temperature and could help track reproductive health, too.
Smart wearables are too mainstream. You have smart glasses, watches, rings, earbuds, headphones, and others that help you perform various tasks and track your health parameters. But most of these are like acquired taste and do not naturally become an essential accessory you can wear all day.
This is where a pair of stylish yet smart earrings could be handy. Created by the University of Washington, the Thermal Earrings can track body temperature better than a smartwatch while monitoring essentials like stress, eating, exercise, and, most importantly, ovulation.
University of WashingtonThe earring has two parts. The top part of the stud remains in touch with the human skin, and the other part dangles below and keeps track of the ambient temperature. The Thermal earring uses Bluetooth to transfer the collected data to your smartphone for an easy-to-understand graphical presentation.
These earrings, small as a paperclip, offer a battery life of up to 28 days, which means they could outrun most smartwatches in this aspect, too.
According to the University’s study, comprising six users, the Thermal earrings “outperformed a smartwatch at sensing skin temperature during rest periods. It also showed promise for monitoring signs of stress, eating, exercise, and ovulation.”
These prototype earrings are made of resin and house multiple sensors to track all the vitals. The University also states that this smart jewelry can be an extension of your personality as these are highly customizable and can even accommodate a gemstone without negatively affecting its accuracy.
Smart earrings have massive potential but we’ll have to wait
University of WashingtonEarlobes are not the most common place to collect health data, but as the sensors remain directly in touch with the skin and can collect more data than most wearables, these smart earrings could give far more accurate health insights.
Various conditions like fevers, stress, and others change the body temperature, thus impacting the menstrual cycle, and can also be reliably tracked using these smart danglers.
That said, the space limitation means that, unlike smartwatches, the Thermal earrings will not support real-time data transfer and cannot send you an instant alert whenever an anomaly occurs.
These are just prototypes, but they give us an idea of how technology can be used efficiently to monitor vital parameters. We will have to wait to see how this idea evolves into fully-blown commercially available products that suit the design and fashion choices of people worldwide.