CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show, is the biggest event of the year for tech manufacturers and enthusiasts around the world. This year’s conference was especially noteworthy, drawing 135,000 visitors to Las Vegas for a week of techno-geekery and innovations in everything from TV to automotive to virtual reality. That’s a significant improvement over last year’s roughly 115,000, and doesn’t even count the various unofficial events that popped up around the strip throughout the week.
With numbers like that, it’s impossible to see everything. That’s why I’ve gathered the best, weirdest and coolest things I saw at this year’s CES into a single list, to help you know what’s really worth paying attention to.
Glasses that are also hearing aids
CES can be pretty crowded, which is where EssilorLuxottica’s new audio-oriented glasses tech comes in. That name might sound unfamiliar, but if you own a pair of glasses in the United States, there’s a good chance you have an EssilorLuxottica product. The massive company serves as the parent for brands including Ray-Ban and Oakley, but its newest product is specifically EssilorLuxottica branded.
The EssilorLuxottica Nuance is intended as a discreet over-the-counter hearing aid solution for those “not served by current options,” CEO Francesco Milleri told me at the company’s booth. It looks like a typical pair of glasses, but hidden away in the frames are a beamforming microphone array and a set of directional speakers, plus a chip for low latency sound processing that I’m told happens in less than 10 milliseconds.
All those smarts together work to eliminate the “cocktail party effect,” which means that when you’re in a crowded room like the CES show floor, you can simply look ahead and the glasses will boost the audio of anyone standing about three to five feet in front of you. The effect worked well for me when I tried it, but is certainly still a work in progress — Milleri’s voice was isolated and louder, but also a little grainy. On the plus side, there was little sound leakage for anyone standing near me, helping to keep our conversation private.
The Nuance aren’t a catch-all solution. They’re aimed at mild to moderate hearing loss, but they take away any embarrassment you could feel from having to ask someone to repeat themself — a godsend at CES.
The Nuance are still in development and do not yet have pricing or a release date.
Truly Wireless Power
CES 2024 saw a couple of companies vying to free us from cables, with two particular standouts. There was the long-promised Ossia Cota, which has been at the show for running on a decade now, but new this year was Ambient Photonics.
Ossia’s promise is to make wireless power work like Wi-Fi. You place one of the company’s modem-like Cota transmitters in your home, and it beams out low level power to any devices boasting compatible batteries within about 10 meters of range.
The power transfer is small, topping off at about 1-3 watts, but the effect is that the Cota can power small household devices like remotes or electronic blinds indefinitely, plus consistently keep phones in its range topped off.
You can’t buy a Cota transmitter yet, since Ossia is primarily a licensing company, and its tech hasn’t been integrated into major brands yet. But this year, Ossia decided to tease a magnetic phone charger that’s about the size of a pack of playing cards. I actually got a percentage or two of charge on my phone off it.
Pricing and availability haven’t been made public yet, but this could be a sign that consumers might soon be able to buy Cota devices directly.
If Cota continues to remain behind closed doors, then in the meantime, Ambient Photonics is promising a different kind of wireless power — solar. It’s a strategy anyone who’s used a calculator in the past three decades should be familiar with. For low power consumption devices, solar cells that soak up sunlight or even indoor light can often be enough. Ambient Photonics takes that strategy and shrinks down those solar cells so they can fit in a broader range of devices, plus uses “novel materials” so that they can soak up more power from low light.
The result is a solution that extends solar power from the humble calculator to tv remotes, keyboard, mice, smoke detector listeners and more. While some of these devices have operated on solar before, there’s a second innovation here — because these cells are so small and so receptive to light, they can be hidden away beneath lightly transparent plastic, essentially making them invisible except when light shines on them. In the future, your wireless mouse might be set-it-and-forget-it, with absolutely no compromises to the design and no need for charging.
LG’s Transparent TV
Before TVs, living rooms used to be built around fireplaces. For those moments when the TV is off, it’s definitely a more picturesque way to relax than sitting next to a big black box. LG’s Signature OLED T hopes to bring some of that philosophy back to how we set up our spaces.
The Signature OLED T is the company’s first consumer-oriented transparent television. It’s quite large at 77 inches, plus it’s capable of 4K fidelity. To preserve a clean aesthetic, it can also wirelessly connect to any compatible devices.
The transparent display is great for casually showing off art or effects or even weather data to spruce up your home, but for those times when you do want to watch something more involved, a black backsplash can roll up behind the screen to give you a more traditional TV or movie experience.
LG hasn’t yet announced the price for this beauty, so start saving up now for its release sometime in 2024.
AI Racecars
Why automate a racecar? Wouldn’t that remove the sport from the racing? Not to Paul Mitchell, president of the Indy Autonomous Challenge, which demonstrated AI-driven race cars at this year’s CES. The only active racing series for autonomous cars, the Indy Autonomous Challenge serves less to test racers and more to test the cars themselves.
“If you look at the birth of motorsports,” Mitchell told me, “it was a proving ground for the automotive industry.”
The Indy Autonomous Challenge works with 18 universities including Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon and MIT to test the bleeding edge of self-driving. We might have self-driving figured out for low and moderate speeds, but what about at 190 miles per hour? Or, more realistically, 70 miles per hour on a highway? The Indy Autonomous Challenge wants to test cars at their absolute extremes, so the lessons learned can be filtered down to consumer technology.
The series has been operating since 2021, but this year saw the teams involved bringing new AI-driven strategies into how they build their vehicles.
“We’ve completely changed the robot inside the car,” Mitchell said, implying that the Indy Autonomous Challenge is already moving on to the next stage of robotics beyond ChatGPT. “I think that you will see the emergence of this generative AI revolution ahead of our kind of broad deployment of AI in the physical world.”
Mitchell wouldn’t give away too many secrets, but said that there’s whole new machine learning algorithms at play here, which were demonstrated at a race in the dark on the Thursday of CES, with cars hitting nearly 200 miles per hour while passing each other in low visibility with no incidents.
“The roads are there,” Mitchell said. “The infrastructure and technology to allow it is there. We have to get the decision making and the technology on the cars to that level. And then our kids can ride in a car at 150 miles per hour while watching a movie.”
Lenovo Magic Bay can slap an extra monitor on top of your laptop
For a tech journalist, the end of December and the beginning of January involve a lot of remote work. Whether we’re traveling to family or to CES, we’re all pretty much stuck on our laptops for the few weeks that mark the move to a new year.
Over the course of the pandemic, I got used to my home office’s excellent multi-monitor setup. I can’t go back to just one keyboard and one screen. Enter Lenovo’s Magic Bay.
Lenovo Magic Bay uses a set of pogo pins that sit at the top of some of its laptops screens, which can magnetically take a number of accessories to make working on a laptop a little easier. It’s been around for a little bit, largely used for webcams, but alongside announcing a new webcam add-on this year, Lenovo also showed off several Magic Bay concepts at this year’s CES.
There was a combination mirror and ring light. There was a robotic buddy who would wink at you. There was a fan, an aroma therapy emitter and perhaps best of all, a 10-inch touchscreen.
Aside from the updated webcam, which is still awaiting pricing and a release date, none of these will be coming to market quite yet.
Lenovo made a laptop with a removable tablet screen
Whenever I pack for a flight, I always tuck my laptop into one carry-on pocket and my iPad into another. It feels excessive, but it’s the best solution I’ve got for being able to work and entertain myself while on the go. Lenovo wants to change that with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid.
Despite having a clunker of a name, the device itself is sleek. On the outside, it looks like your typical laptop, but with light force, the screen actually comes off. Once removed, it turns into an Android tablet for entertainment or apps, while the keyboard actually continues to run Windows. You can use this to consolidate devices, yes, but plug that keyboard into an external monitor, and you’ve suddenly got a full two-device setup on the go.
That’s certainly a step beyond your typical convertible laptop (laptops with screens that swing 360 degrees backwards to become Windows tablets aren’t exactly new). Look for it starting in Q2 of 2024 for $1,999 and up.
Samsung Ballie
Smart home robots like LG’s new AI Agent aren’t exactly new. They might look like droids out of Star Wars, but the technology is considerably tamer —essentially, slap an Amazon Echo hub on wheels and let it drive around. Samsung’s Ballie, though, is just cute enough to make a case for itself.
Ballie distinguishes itself from competitors with both a BB-8 style spherical shape and an R2-D2 style projector in its head. This lets it look much more like an actual robot than competitors like Amazon Astro, which looks like an iPad riding a Segway.
Ballie can control lights, recognize you when you come home, display content and just generally be a little buddy. If that sounds vague, it’s because Samsung hasn’t put out too many details on whether it’ll actually be purchasable someday, or if it’s just a concept.
Samsung Music Frame
Samsung’s Frame TV made waves in 2017 when it aimed to turn the television into the equivalent of a painting. Now, the Music Frame wants to do the same for music.
Essentially a smart speaker with room in the center for an art print, either custom or chosen from a selection of Samsung’s own options, the Music Frame disguises your favorite songs or podcasts as wall art. Its front firing audio array can also connect to televisions to serve as surround sound speakers.
Pricing and release date are not yet known, but Samsung clarified that the Music Frame will have two speakers each for high frequencies, mid-range ones and bass.
Samsung 3D gaming monitor
Glasses free 3D for gamers hasn’t really been seen in a mainstream product since Nintendo’s 3DS. There’s some niche monitors and laptops from companies like Acer, but Samsung’s concept 3D gaming monitor wants to take the idea outside of the enthusiast space.
Not yet bearing a name, a price or exact technical specifications, the monitor I played on at CES nonetheless impressed, with rich depth and webcams that followed my movement so that the 3D could properly adjust to where I was. While previous options required me to view from specific angles, it was difficult to get anything but a crisp image out of this device, which can also swap to a 2D mode for general use.
Even better — unlike films, video games don’t need to be shot in 3D to produce 3D visuals, so if the monitor ever sees a general release, it should work just fine with your existing library.
Razer’s massage pad for gamers
Massage pads aren’t exactly associated with youth, but Razer’s Project Esther doesn’t care. The edgy video game accessory company is hoping that by tying the vibrations from a massage pad into the action of a video game, it can immerse players further than ever before.
Just a concept for now, I got to try it in a match of Mortal Kombat as well as a training room in Mechwarrior. I was worried that the experience would be stressful — like getting punched in real life. But while the timing and location of the pad’s vibrations were tied to where I was getting hit in game, the actual force of the pad was as pleasant as any other massage.
That’s because Razer worked with actual doctors on the device to fine tune its 16 motors for a mix between immersion and comfort. By the end of my test, I actually felt more relaxed than when I went in, even if my Mortal Kombat character got his head ripped off.
Like Samsung’s 3D monitor, Razer’s massage pad will be able to work with any game when it eventually comes to market, as it can use audio data to figure out where and when to vibrate. But Razer is also releasing a tool for developers who want to fine tune things even further.
Sony is making a VR headset for artists
Sony’s CES 2024 press conference was largely a recap of its accomplishments throughout 2023, but the company did take the time in the middle of its bragging to tease one innovation.
Following up on its PlayStation VR2 gaming headset, Sony’s making a VR and AR headset for creators.
Currently unnamed and unpriced, the device would have one 4K display per eye and would run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip (a mouthful, but take that to mean it would be powerful). It would also have a flip-up screen, and uniquely, would be controlled through a ring and a pointer. The idea is that artists could intuitively sculpt in 3D, and flip up the headset to quickly test how their environment looks both with and without their 3D model in it.
Sony drove a car on stage with a PlayStation controller
During Sony’s CES 2024 press conference, Sony COO Izumi Kawanishi surprised the audience by taking out a PlaySation 5 controller and claiming to drive a car with it. The car, a collaboration between Sony and Honda called the Afeela, is still just a prototype, but drove out the scant few feet from backstage to main stage without issue, even turning left along the way.
I didn’t get a great view of the car from my vantage point, but as impressive as it looked from the back, some of my fellow tech journalists have raised concerns. David Pierce of The Verge says Kawanishi didn’t move his thumbs once while driving the car. Sony’s PlayStation 5 controller does have motion controls, which the CEO could have used instead, but there are accusations floating around that the company faked the demo.
At any rate, Sony said the ability wouldn’t be coming to the final car, but it was a neat visualization of what remote driving could look like in the future.
I walked through a New York holodeck
In an immersive experience exclusive to CES for now, Sony took attendees on a virtual tour of a New York street. Not quite a holodeck, the experience still made me pine for home, as screens showing off an unusually deserted city street wrapped around the edges of the room, and more impressively, a haptic and pressure sensitive floor allowed me to actually crush trash under my feet as I walked.
As the demo went on, Sony couldn’t resist tossing in some IP with a small Ghostbusters encounter, but frankly, I was just happy to feel the sticky, dank streets of home beneath my feet once again.
MSI Claw PC gaming handheld
Ever since Valve released its Steam Deck in 2022, more and more companies keep entering the handheld gaming PC space. This year was MSI’s turn, as the company took the time to announce the MSI Claw gaming handheld.
For non-gamers, know that the announcement is somewhat of a first. Handheld gaming PCs essentially allow PC gamers the flexibility of the Nintendo Switch, but with additional power, and MSI’s is the first to integrate Intel’s powerful new Core Ultra chips. While those chips will soon get strong competitors from AMD, their usage renders the MSI Claw one of the more powerful options on the market right now.
It’s also lightweight and comfortable, with a build mimicking Asus’ popular ROG Ally handheld. However, it’s still stuck on Windows, which can be a blessing for compatibility, but can make actually using the device a little finicky. For those wanting a simple experience, Valve’s Steam Deck is still the best option.
The MSI Claw starts at $699 and will begin selling in the second half of 2024.
A glasses free 3D phone
Leia isn’t just Luke Skywalker’s sister. It’s also the name of a company that makes glasses free 3D panels. While Leia doesn’t sell directly to consumers, its technology is already in monitors from companies like Asus and Lenovo.
While I wasn’t allowed to take photos, Leia showed me one of my absolute favorite devices of CES — a phone with a glasses-free 3D display. Even as 3D cuts resolution in half, the picture was clear, and the 3D effect easily adjusted as I moved around, never fading or giving me a headache. It was also plenty deep, rather than just layering on mild depth.
I’m excited to see what comes of this project when Leia gets less hush hush about who its partner is. It’s certainly the closest I’ve ever felt to having a hologram in my pocket.
In the same vein, I also met with Jellop at the show to see the Looking Glass Go, which I can show pictures of (although the 3D effect won’t come across in them). It works in much the same way as Leia’s device, but is intended for multiple viewers at once, and is a sort of digital picture frame. Because of that, the 3D effect isn’t as deep, but the viewing angle is wider, stretching up to 60 degrees. More impressively, Jellop’s AI processing can extrapolate 3D models from 2D images, allowing any photo to be uploaded for display on the device. Photos taken on modern smartphones will be even more convincing, since the Looking Glass Go will be able to use the image’s own depth data as it converts it to 3D.
The Looking Glass Go is up for pre-order on Kickstarter for $250 (and will eventually be available through the company’s website for $300), and can also plug into a laptop or phone to display animated content, including a 3D avatar for ChatGPT.
Segway GoKart Pro 2
Segway is most well known for its stand-up, ride-on, scooter-like devices. But the company actually has ventures ranging from waiter robots to automatic lawn mowers. While I got to see those at CES, too, the one that excited me most was the GoKart Pro 2.
The GoKart Pro 2 is your typical electric go kart, with specs allowing it to reach 15 mph, but what sets it apart is actually what it can do while parked.
The most dedicated of racing game players know how much of a pain it is to get an accurate simulation of a racecar cockpit in the home, with steering wheels, pedals, mounts and even haptic seats all adding up to thousands of dollars spent when combined.
Those who happen to own the GoKart Pro 2 can circumvent all of that, as it can also be used to control racing games when parked, thanks to a controller built into the steering wheel that supplements the wheel and pedals when in game. At an expected price of over $2,300 (based on the previous model), that’s still a pricey proposition, but at least this setup can actually move when it’s not gaming. And even better — it can use its motor to make gamers feel like they’re really driving while in their living room.
Shoes that make you walk faster
The Moonwalkers X are an evolution on an existing concept, but it’s a cool concept, and one I didn’t get to try until this year.
Looking something like roller skates, the Moonwalkers X are two motorized, wheeled platforms that you strap onto your feet, one on each foot. Then, you simply walk as usual and the motors will kick in and help you “walk at the speed of a run.”
Moonwalkers says it already has a number of business partners with employees using the shoes, largely in warehouses and factories. Supposedly, the factories using the shoes have upped productivity by quite a bit (I’m not able to share specific numbers), as employees cut down on travel time.
What the Moonwalkers X introduce is a slightly lighter weight, compatibility with more shoe sizes and quicker start and stop times on the motors.
My only reservations are that the shoes are a bit heavy when moving slowly, and that it takes a while to learn not to make a roller skate motion while using the shoes. I could see both of these issues fading with time, though, as users get more comfortable with the shoes and start to reach higher speeds with them.
Shift Robotics, the company behind Moonwalkers, has yet to clarify pricing or availability.
Panasonic Soundslayer
The Panasonic Soundslayer is a wearable speaker, giving users access to headphone-like audio without having to wear something on or in their ears. Instead, you can simply wear it around your neck like a boa, and it’ll shoot spatial audio into your left and right ears appropriately.
There’s two big use cases for this. The first is for passive content like ASMR, which is reliant on audio being sent out across multiple channels. The second is for gaming, where being able to accurately place where a sound is coming from can give the player a competitive edge.
It’s certainly a more comfortable option than headphones, but there is a catch. For the audio to not echo or lose quality too much, it has to be turned up quite high. That means everyone around you will be able to hear what you’re listening to pretty easily. Maybe save this for when you’ve got the house to yourself.
The Panasonic Soundslayer is available now for $299.
BMW took me on an AR augmented ride
As a concept at this year’s CES, BMW demonstrated how drivers and passengers could each benefit from AR in the future. While at the company’s demonstration in its lot this year, I took a ride in a car while wearing a pair of XReal XR2 glasses and walked away surprisingly impressed by something that seemed unsafe at first glance.
I’m not a fan of technological interruptions while driving, but BMW’s demo wasn’t that. Instead, I got to see AR walls pop up to let the driver know they were about to hit something in their blind spot, and an AR arrow tell them when they needed to turn right. An AR speed limit sign showed them how fast to drive and an AR reminder let them know when they were coming up on their destination. Essentially, they had all the benefits of a screen in the car, but without requiring them to look away from the road.
That’s a game changer for me. I’m a ten and two kind of girl, and automotive safety is very important to me. That said, there were still fun interactions available exclusively to me as a passenger. Those not driving could play AR games using head tracking (such as collecting tokens by looking at them while driving by) or even pull down the visor and look at it through AR glasses to use it as a screen.
The only problem was that the glasses somewhat dim vision, so BMW told me it’s closely following the AR glasses announcements coming from the rest of the show. When it feels the tech has caught up to the idea, maybe it’ll make AR rides more than a concept.
Kohler’s E Ink Toilet
Kohler brought its Numi 2.0 smart toilet, which costs upwards of $9,900 and has features including a stainless steel bidet wand and “integrated personal cleaning,” to CES this year. But that’s not strictly an innovation. What was new was a concept that placed E Ink screens all over the outside of the toilet. While not necessarily being sold to customers at the moment, the E Ink toilet would be able to display a number of different patterns (including color ones) all over the outside of the appliance, in case it’s important to you for your toilet to look artful.
HP Sprocket Photobooth
The HP Sprocket Photobooth exists solely for fun. It’s not the most efficient or highest quality way to take a selfie, but it’s going to kill at the next wedding you go to. At $450, it essentially puts an amusement park style photobooth inside your home.
A large, desktop style device, it comes with a camera, a ring light, a screen for applying filters and effects and a printer for instantly delivering results. For anyone familiar with HP’s other Sprocket devices, it basically takes their instant photography tech (zero ink paper, for one), enlarges it and cuts out the need to connect your own camera.
Visual fidelity snobs will hate it, sure, but anyone who misses Polaroids is going to find a lot of delight in this thing, especially since the photos it produces are also stickers.
Mudra Band
The creators of the Mudra Band want you to never be without a mouse again. This device adds extra functionality to Apple Watch bands by giving them the ability to read motion as well as electrical signals coming from the brain.
Combine those two inputs together, and you can get an accurate, clickable cursor just by moving your hand around and tapping your fingers together.
How does it work? An accelerometer, the same kind you might find in your phone, first determines how you’re moving your arm. Then, when you touch two fingers together, the device’s SNCs follow the electrical signal your brain creates to perform that motion and clicks the mouse. Relaxing your hand unclicks the mouse.
With these simple interactions, I was able to accurately navigate around an Apple TV menu and play two games, one involving stretching a claymation face and the other involving conducting a violinist.
It’s simple, but great for anyone who doesn’t want to fumble with a remote or rely on touch controls or voice commands. The Mudra band works with the iPhone, Apple TV, Mac and iPad, and is available now for $350.
Titan Haptics showed my a lightsaber
Titan Haptics is a smaller company, but smaller companies are half the fun at CES, and these guys showed me a lightsaber. Though impressively similar to Disney’s own glowing prop lightsabers in look and build, the laser sword itself isn’t actually what the company is selling. Instead, Titan Haptics was showing me a new motor it developed that was able to accurately recreate what it would feel like to hold a lightsaber and swing it around, much more so than Disney’s options.
As I moved the lightsaber, the weight of the device shifted with me, and I even heard a hum — which came not from the speakers, but just the motors themselves.
Gamers are familiar with the base concept here. Ever since the original Dualshock for the Playstation, game controllers have featured rumble. Originally, it was a simple on/off vibration, but it’s gotten more detailed over the years, with devices like the Nintendo Switch able to trigger two different frequencies of rumble for extra feedback.
The Titan Haptics motor can do 300 frequencies.
The possibilities here are immense, and Titan Haptics is currently looking for partners. On top of making a lightsaber that felt like it was actually humming in my hand, Titan Haptics also showed me a disc that can play music just through its vibrating motors, and a mouse and wristrest that were able to add vibration to PC games — something that’s rarely done. It even let me test out a device that can mimic a cat’s purrs, which are said to promote healing.
Most of what Titan Haptics showed me was conceptual, but its motors are available to individual consumers now. The company’s running a CES deal through Monday, hoping makers will use its motors to give their projects a good vibe.
Barcodes of the future
“Scan failed. Please scan again.” I’m sick of hearing it, but it’s a constant refrain whenever I use the self checkout at my local grocery store. Idyllic wants to change all that. The company took to CES this year with a secret that has been under wraps until now: RFID tags that cost just a cent.
For the unaware, RFID tags are little stickers you can place on pretty much anything to allow electronics equipped with special readers, or NFCs, to know what they are. They’ve previously cost about 10 – 15 cents to make, and while they make for a great barcode replacement, the cost of using them has been too prohibitive at scale.
At just a penny per tag, though, they become tempting. Although not free like traditional barcodes, RFID tags present a number of advantages. The first is that they don’t need to be placed in any specific way to get picked up by the reader. The second is that they’re recognized as soon as they come in range of the reader, with a much lower chance of getting a failed read. And the third is that they work while inside boxes.
In other words, an Amazon driver could take a box with ten items inside, each with their own RFID tag, pass it through a reader without opening it, and get every item inside the box entered into the system anyway.
That presents a significant time saving opportunity for companies, enough to maybe offset the one cent per tag price. But I’m just looking forward to when these things make their way into grocery stores, and I never have to get sass from the self checkout counter again.
Rabbit R1 AI Assistant
The Rabbit R1 looks a bit like an Etch A Sketch or a ‘90s era handheld TV, but it’s actually one of the more advanced devices to come out of this year’s CES. Its specs are simple — a low power MediaTek processor, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage — but the $199 device could potentially do almost anything your phone can, and more conveniently. As with plenty of other devices shown off at this year’s show, it uses AI, but rather than focus on a ChatGPT style “large language model,” it’s instead trained on a “large action model.”
That means Rabbit’s developers trained the device on hundreds of videos of real people interacting with apps like Grubhub or Spotify, so that the box could learn to recognize settings menus and purchase buttons. Now, it’s promised to be able to order pizzas or create playlists off a simple voice request, even if the apps it’s interacting with don’t have AI built in.
It’s an ambitious promise, but one you’ll have to wait a bit to test for yourself. The company’s original run of 10,000 units has already sold out, and even those won’t hit customers until sometime in March or April.
Withings BeamO
Withings’ new BeamO smart thermometer is something like a magic wand for health reading. A device the size of a candy bar, it goes beyond taking temperature, and can also work as a stethoscope, a blood oxygen sensor and an ECG.
That’s an impressive suite of tests for a single device, especially as all-in-one health testers are still currently under heavy scrutiny following the Theranos scandal. But all of the tech here has been proven in other gadgets, as Withings borrows from smartphones for blood oxygen testing and uses tried-and-true piezoelectric sensors for listening to lungs.
That’s not to say there’s no innovation here. Stethoscope readings can be recorded and shared with doctors, or even live streamed to them in real time, to help improve telehealth. There’s also a mobile app that can create a health record over time, which can also be shared with doctors.
The Withings BeamO will start selling around June this year for $250, pending FDA approval.