We’ve all been there – eagerly awaiting the biggest football match of the season, making sure that all your work assignments are complete so your boss won’t interrupt you in the middle of the match. We also took an extra step of taking wife and kids out a day before so you can spend some quality “me” time in front of the TV shouting at your favorite team to score the winner, without feeling guilty that you’re ignoring your family.
You do all that, and much more, just to catch a game, and when the much awaited night arrives, you pass out from sheer exhaustion, or some other irrelevant reason. Meaning you miss your game and you’ve got nobody else to blame but yourself! Like I said, we’ve all been there, and that sinking feeling of an evening wasted sleeping in front of the TV while you could be enjoying the match, is universal. So much so, it has prompted Virgin Media to develop a device specifically to counter this horrendous malaise.
Virgin Introduces the KipstR, a Wristband that Can Sense if You Fall Asleep in Front of the TV.
Virgin Media’s KipstR is a 3D printed wrist band that senses if the person is awake or asleep and if it is the latter, it communicates with the users’ TiVo box (a set top box with recording capabilities) and commands it to begin recording the program being watched. It’s as simple as that, and once you think about it, you wonder why no one ever came up with that idea before. And its taken two teenagers from Manchester to point out the gap in the market and provide a product that could come in use to anybody who owns a TV – a huge demographic, undoubtedly.
The KipstR is the brainchild of Jonathan Kingsley and Ryan Oliver, aged 14 and 15 respectively.
As part of Virgin Media’s ‘Switched On Futures’ campaign, which aims at increasing the technical proficiency of the public in order to spur innovation in the digital sphere, Kingsley and Oliver – both studying at the Machester Creative Studio – have been commissioned to build the KipstR. The design is fairly simple and straightforward – the KipstR is a band that you can wrap around your wrist and it is powered by a small Li-Po battery. The battery helps to run a spark core chip, a sleep mode indicator and the most important component of the device – the pulse-oximeter.
In order to detect whether the wearer is awake or asleep, the pulse-oximeter tracks their blood flow by analyzing the oxygen content in the blood. The oxygen content changes depending on the state the person is in and if they were to fall asleep, the oximeter would switch on the sleep mode indicator and commands TiVo to start recording. If you do manage to wake up before the program ends, the KipstR senses that too and the TiVo will instantly stop recording. The KipstR currently works only with Virgin Media TiVo boxes.
The KipstR is a fun, innovative and simple device that can come in handy when you need it the most, for all those programs and matches you missed because you slept in front of the TV.
