It’s something that can happen to all of us, that we forget things. Young and old, we know things are on our to-do list but in the heat of the moment they disappear from our minds and we miss them. There are a myriad of technological answers to this in the form of reminders and calendars, but [Nick Bild] has come up with possibly the most inventive yet. His Newrons project is a pair of glasses with a machine vision camera, that flashes a light when it detects an object in its field of view associated with a calendar entry.
At its heart is a JeVois A33 Smart Machine Vision Camera, which runs a neural network trained on an image dataset. It passes its sightings to an Arduino Nano IoT fitted with a real-time clock, that pulls appointment information from Google Calendar and flashes the LED when it detects a match between object and event. His example which we’ve placed below the break is a pill bottle triggering a reminder to take the pills.
We like this idea, but can’t help thinking that it has a flaw in that the reminder relies on the object moving into view. A version that tied this in with more conventional reminding based upon the calendar would address this, and perhaps save the forgetful a few problems.
Nice project.
To be able to develop something like this in spare time and living room is really something.
Thanks so much for the post!
If I understand your comment correctly: “…it has a flaw in that the reminder relies on the object moving into view. A version that tied this in with more conventional reminding based upon the calendar would address this…” I think it’s addressed for free by the design of the project. Since it relies on an external calendar, you already get traditional phone notifications, reminder emails, etc. if you choose. Newrons steps in to give gentle, immediately actionable notifications when convenient. It reminds you of the things you need to do from those phone notifications you blew off because couldn’t do them when the notification came in, then you forgot about them (which is what I do!).
Yes, you don’t do things in the kitchen because your’re in living room, by the time you go to the kitchen you forgot again. I could see this being very useful if it works well. However, I am thinking that the deliberation of the training process it’s as likely to train the user more than the device.