Amoeba - New Wearable Technology

By Avinash Yadav

Photography: Courtesy Sanya Rai Gupta

‘Amoeba’

‘Amoeba’ is the new futuristic app on the anvil that will help you navigate through your browsing data; prioritizing and retrieving with ease...

With wearable technology gaining momentum, young students of Innovation Design and Information Technology seem to be coming up with ideas that make everyday life simpler in many small ways.

 

 Carine Collé, Florian Puech & Sanya Rai Gupta

Amoeba device 

Brain child of Sanya Rai Gupta, Carine Collé and Florian Puech, students of Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, London, the Amoeba App is a device designed for mapping one’s browsing data. Especially suited to web-based research work, the device is a fashionably styled monocle and works on 3 basic biometric parameters - skin conductance; pupil dilation and breathing rate. 

Here’s how it works:

Interface

Browsing data highlighting interest level 

You need to wear the device while browsing the web, doing your research. The 3 biometric parameters then correlate with your browsing data at any given period of time, measure your interest level (Bigger Circles = Higher Interest) and map it. The app then summarizes the entire detail on a visual timeline that gives you a low down on your interest and relevance; the links you visited with an option on how you arrived at a certain page using the path function.  This summary can be accessed on call.

System map to illustrate the infrastructure

The current version of Amoeba is developed on Windows but the app can run on any Google Chrome-compatible system. Designed to grab eye-balls, its fluid form makes a style statement. As the designers say, “We wanted to be honest about the function. So everyone knows that the wearer is in research-mode.”

‘Amoeba’ prototype exhibit at the WIP Show 2014,  Royal College of Art,  London

With the prototype introduced at various exhibitions, seeking public opinion and reaction, Amoeba awaits refinement in terms of design to ensure maximum user comfort and other software integrations for the product to be market-ready. 

Prototype

In a world, where increasing digital interactions are constantly bombarding us with vast amounts of data, the Amoeba app may just prove to be an organizational boon.