Tech of the Week: Darma Smart Cushion

Darma Smart Cushion

Back pain is one of the most commons health problems our modern society faces. Darma aims to fix that. Boasting features from monitoring you posture, sittings habits, stress level, and coaching you to sit better.
How bad is sitting? Studies have shown that the hours you sit is related to various cancers, heart conditions, metabolic conditions, depression, anxiety and depression.

“Good posture is the key to good health.”

 Possible Pros:

Improved health. A technology that could be a category killer for many other apps and devices (i.e. reminder timers, heart rate apps)

Possible Cons:

Price, good chance this is the only cushion you’ll pay $100+ for. Accuracy, will it really be able to measure your stress levels and heart rate variability? It’s still not completely clear.

Regardless they definitely have plenty of backers. Their Kickstarter campaign ended at $225,574, over 5 times their goal.

Early units are planned to go out from March – June 2015 with no word, as of yet, on public access.

Tech of the Week: Tellspec

The tech of the week is TellSpec! Which “intends to revolutionize our health by empowering us with knowledge about the food we eat” and it could, in theory, do just that.

What was originally an Indiegogo project and dream of Isabel Hoffman and Dr. Stephen Watson is now a company backed with nearly $400,000 and a public release due in November of 2014 (now pushed to Q1 of 2015).
Possible Pros:

• Knowing how many calories a food has rather than guessing
• Knowing what ingredients and possible allergens are in a food
• App to quickly sync with your phone
• With the planned size that of a hand it’ll be very mobile
• Cool factor (who doesn’t want a spectrometer on their key chain?)

Possible Cons:

• Size, following the newsletter and updates they have been having difficulties getting the product to the desired size
• Battery life. If it is the planned size and it’s running a spectrometer what kind of battery life will it have?
• Price, although the Indiegogo units were as cheap as $150 there is a planned yearly subscription fee for using the service

All and all it’s too soon to tell if TellSpec will live up to its promises but it will definitely be interesting to see what happens in the first quarter of 2015.