On the eve of the official opening of CES 2015, Pepcom held its annual Digital Experience showcase once again, with dozens of companies highlighting their latest products. As expected, there was a strong focus on home automation, health, and fitness solutions, although most remain proprietary as Apple’s HomeKit is still in its fledgling stages. Some interesting solutions appeared among the companies showing, however, and among the more edgy solutions, we also saw some interesting traditional headphones still from a brand new startup company, with a useful twist.
Canary ($250) is a new home monitoring and security solution contained in a single, stylish package.
Featuring an array of sensors that monitor sound, temperature, light levels, and more, Canary is designed to learn your normal patterns so that it can alert you when there’s unusual activity while you’re away from home. Alerts include live streaming HD video and audio so you can decide how to best respond, with options that include sounding an alert siren or contacting the authorities. Canary provides its own cloud-based service, but requires no subscription fees.
iHealth’s Edge is a new fitness and sleep tracker that measures steps taken, calories burned, distance traveled, hours slept, and sleep efficiency. Users can set goals and enable silent vibration alarms, and the watch-like device is submersible up to 50 feet.
iHealth has introduced Gateway, a new professional home healthcare solution that can be deployed to elderly or disabled users, providing a simple user interface for taking vital measurements such as blood pressure and glucose levels. A companion iOS app can allow a healthcare provider or family member to connect to the Gateway to monitor stats in real-time and receive alerts when conditions are outside of normal ranges.
Leef’s iBridge ($60 – $300) is a Lightning based flash drive for iOS devices, effectively allowing users to expand their storage by storing media content outside of the iOS device memory, and providing a way to transfer photos and videos off the device. The companion app also provides the ability to snap photos directly onto the flash memory. iBridge is available in capacities from 16GB to 256GB and is shipping now.
