Slowly but surely, technology is finding its way into every wearable accessory we own – the best smartwatches have been on the market for years, serving not only as extensions of our smartphones but also as health and fitness trackers, while the best smart rings offer sensors for important health metrics in a smaller package than watches. And now it’s time to get ready for smart earrings.
Researchers from the University of Washington have revealed this Thermal earring, which is worn in your ear like a normal earring and is equipped with two temperature sensors. One of these sits in the stud and detects your skin temperature, while the other dangles below it, monitors the ambient temperature around you and sends the readings from both sensors via Bluetooth to a compatible device (via Android Police).
Thanks to this dual-sensor system, researchers found that it can measure body temperature better than a smartwatch – at least for the six participants who have tried the earring so far.
If this improved accuracy applies to a larger group of subjects, the team behind the earring hopes it could become a useful health tool. Improved temperature accuracy could lead to a more reliable version of the menstrual cycle tracking we’ve come to see in smartwatches, and the earrings could help any wearer by alerting them to fever, stress, and other conditions that can affect body temperature.
Not ready to wear yet
However, before we all start wearing smart earrings, there are still a few things to work out. For starters, as mentioned above, many more tests will need to be conducted, as a sample size of six people is far too small to draw any far-reaching conclusions.
Then there is the design. If hanging circuit boards aren’t your thing, you can add resin charms to hide them, but this solution won’t be to everyone’s taste, and more universally stylish designs will need to be made available and tested to ensure they have the accuracy do not affect. .
Additionally, the design will need to be modified to use material such as silver or another hypoallergenic metal, otherwise the thermal earrings could cause more problems for some people than they solve.
Overall, though, we’re excited about the idea of smart earrings and can’t wait to see these designs in a product we can actually buy and wear.
Smartwatches have become one-stop shops for health and fitness, but your wrist probably isn’t the best place to measure all your vital signs. By distributing their sensors across multiple wearables that all work together, you can place them where they are most effective, which in turn should allow for more accurate and useful health and fitness monitoring.