Gadgetory

what if your next fitness wearable weighs about Oh 30 500 pounds it's not entirely unlikely as more and more technology companies are deciding the inside of a car can be a wellness monitoring tool for SIA here is a good example they call this their active wellness seat technology I am right now sitting on a sensor it looks like a seat but in the bottom cushion is a sensor you can call it a butt sensor because it's using my rump to figure out my heart rate and my respiration and then the tricky part is doing a very complicated signal-to-noise process to take out all the vehicles vibration and thumping it all gets reported up somewhere in the dash like on this mock-up there's my heart rate there's my respiration rate right there below that they're able to use another algorithm to figure out if I'm stressed right now or if I'm sleeping in the metals fine but either those extremes it can then do some kind of seat therapy on me a combination of massage heat and cooling could be used to wake me up if it's a really vigorous massage with cooling or calm me down maybe if it's a more calm massage some other factors that you can deal with once you have this data captured you can send that off to a medical professional you can also MUX that data together with what's coming off your Fitbit for example to get more accurate data overall interesting wrinkle on crash detection what if one a collision is detected they don't just send the severity of the crash on the location but they can also send my heart rate and respiration to emergency responders they know a little bit more but what they're gonna get into when they arrive here then if they don't have that data and then from this of course automakers can decide to extend that more they can tap into a sensing seat like this to do their own sort of response systems for different moods also make it part of a holistic almost intuitive sport mode or comfort mode for the overall drivetrain depending on what mood you bring to the car that would be on the OEMs plate to do that by the way the medical grade sensors behind this technology are already in use in hospital beds to measure certain patient Jaguar sees using them as part of a platform called mind sense in addition to reading brainwaves it also envisions a biometric seat to read heart rate and respiration rate particularly to better know how to alert the driver of a future autonomous Jaguar when they need to take control again the advanced Institute of industrial technology in Tokyo was several years ago working on a seat tech that reads the contours of your rump to identify you basically a butt print to get access to the car and a few years ago Ferrari applied for a patent on seat technology that would go beyond measuring heart and respiration by adding brainwaves measured by a headrest sensors in the aim of better tailoring the cars drive mode to the drivers mental hook clearly the day is coming when car seats will do a lot more than just keep you off the floor more car tech demystified right now at CNET on cars comm click on car tech 101