While the privacy debate intensifies, digital sensors continue to turn up in more places, often with specifically defined benefits.
*Microsoft’s new Xbox Kinect motion-activated video game device, for instance, asks first-time players to strike poses until the unit recognizes them, says David Dennis, Xbox product manager. Thereafter, a player needs only to look directly into the sensor and Kinect will recognize the user and let him or her play. It will also instantly log the user into Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online home entertainment subscription service.
*Affectiva supplies technology that marketing consultants are using to analyze the emotional responses of consumers as they try out new products. Video cameras are used in conjunction with facial recognition software to index the expressions of subjects as they watch new movies, play new video games or try new business software.
“This technology provides a level of emotional feedback data that wasn’t available before,” says David Berman, CEO of Affectiva, which was co-founded by a professor and a research scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
*BeClose supplies infrared sensors designed to be placed throughout a home to help caregivers remotely monitor the sick or elderly. The sensors detect when a window or door is opened, when furniture gets moved or when someone uses the kitchen or bathroom.
“We look for changes in heat moving across the field of view,” says Mark Hanson, BeClose’s vice president of technology, for the Vienna, Va.-based start-up company. “It could be a person or any sort of moving object.”
The sensor data are streamed wirelessly to a home base station, roughly the size of a book, which relays the data via a cellphone connection to BeClose for indexing.
For a $299 set-up fee and a $49 monthly subscription, the company monitors normal living activities and alerts the caregiver about any unusual patterns.
“We allow the person at…