How Can Unique Wearable Tech Change Your Life for the Better?

Perhaps your Fitbit indicates you really need to get more sleep, or you love how your Apple Watch gives weather conditions at a glance and makes it easier to decide what to wear for a comfortable commute to work. However, these aren’t the only ways wearable tech shows promise for today’s society. Keep reading to learn about interesting examples of how gadgets you wear could offer life-changing experiences.

Wearable Tech and Its Impact on Preventative Medicine

Healthcare professionals have suggested wearable tech could make it easier for doctors to pull up a patient’s medical records or see how they live their daily lives, and then present strategies for adopting healthier habits. Those uses for wearable tech are undoubtedly interesting and thought-provoking, but it’s also useful to consider how a person might depend on wearable tech to prevent debilitating health problems.

Recently, researchers explored using wearable tech to reduce the occurrence of asthma attacks. Patients most often manage symptoms with inhalers, but even so, they may find themselves in environments that trigger life-threatening attacks. Scientists from the joint biomedical engineering program associated with two North Carolina universities are working on a low-power system that involves wearing a wristband and chest patch to monitor bodily characteristics, such as the amount of oxygen in the lungs, whether a person is wheezing and his or her heart and respiration rate.

Thanks to the collected data, the wearable tech alerts people that their environments may cause asthma attacks and encourages them to make improvements and thereby avoid their inhalers. The negative aspect of this tech is that it’ll be a while before you can use it. Scientists still have to put the device through further human trials.

Wearable Tech That Lets You Calm Fido From Afar

Years ago, wearable tech for animals merely extended to GPS collars that helped you find pets after they wandered away from home. But wearable tech for furry family members has become a booming business that offers you the opportunity to buy not only pet-trackers but also lighted dog vests you can alter to read “Lost Dog” so everyone knows your canine is on the run.

Also, pet trackers have become more robust in their feature sets. Motorola’s Scout 5000 device has a GPS function and streams video data of your pet’s activities to your smartphone. Perhaps the most innovative feature it offers compared to competing products is a speaker so you can speak to your pet even if you’re not nearby.

Theoretically, this high-tech gadget could help you soothe an anxious pet through the sound of your voice and encourage it to return to familiar territory. For a pet owner, a runaway critter represents a real-life nightmare, especially if the pet is very skittish and not accustomed to being away from home. While using the Scout 5000, you could quickly become reunited with the wayward animal thanks to the familiar feedback of your voice.

Even though it’s your pet that wears the device, it’s not hard to see why it changes your life, too. Unfortunately, this pet tech comes at a hefty price, since it retails for about $200. As many animal lovers would argue, almost no cost is too great to keep pets safe.

Glasses That Help You Reach Your Destination Without Hassles

The forward-thinking makers of the Mini Cooper think of wearable tech as something that could make it easier to drive safely and become more aware. Marketed as Mini Augmented Vision, the concept requires wearing glasses while behind the wheel. Unlike Google Glass, which has a comparatively limited field of view, these smart glasses offer real-time information for the entire environment you see.

Look straight ahead, and you’ll notice different information than if you turn your head to the right. Besides providing navigational guidance, the glasses give alerts about incoming text messages and allow you to push a button on the steering wheel to hear an audio version of the correspondence. The eyewear even lets you see through doors, thanks to exterior cameras mounted on the car. When you look at a door, the glasses show you the view on the other side.

They effectively make pedestrians more visible and could aid in parking the car by showing you how far you are from the curb. One downside is that the glasses currently only show road signs as flat objects, but engineers say the technology is constantly evolving to minimize that shortcoming. As you can see, the future of wearable tech is unmistakably bright. These concepts show how things we would have previously dismissed as fanciful impossibilities are becoming useful realities that enhance our lives.