Corey Menscher, an ITP student I had the pleasure to meet this week while checking out the awesome final projects from Dennis Crowley’s class, has built a clever sensor-based device for pregnant women to wear that senses the baby’s kicks and initiates a Twitter message for all those not carrying the baby to share in the experience. I love this stuff.
The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API. I chose to use Twitter because it is easy to initiate an SMS message to any mobile phone when a kick is detected. It also acts as a data log that can be accessed programmatically for visualization or archiving.
Check out the output here.
Read all about Kickbee here (via psfk)
PS: He’s also building a super cool location-based trivia + scavenger hunt called Geogeni.us (something many have tried and almost all have failed) for Dennis’ class. In my opinion, Geogeni.us is handling one of the major stumbling blocks to these kinds of apps (solution confirmation) in a really clever way (hint: solutions tied to locations). Check it out!