Everyday Household Product Innovations
While we all plan to venture back out into the world this year, the home will remain a hub for our work and life. So it’s a good time to think about how you may want to upgrade your environment. This week we focus on household innovations that are new to the market in 2022 for remote work, home automation, and home health.
Enhanced Work From Home
Photo via Amazon.com
2. Horizon Workrooms by Meta is the next step in creating more focused and collaborative remote meetings. In order to enter a Horizon Workroom, you must have a Quest 2 VR headset and remote which may seem like a big investment to companies but the payoff of productivity and more creative work could be huge. One really cool functionality is that when turned upside down, the controllers turn into usable markers in the virtual space. So users can write or draw on their ‘desk’ and post it onto a white board. Note that this isn’t meant to be something used all of the time, rather a replacement for zoom meetings. Facebook has actually been using it for about 9 months now. Get a full explanation of what the Horizon Workroom looks like and has to offer from this video.
Home Safety and Monitoring
Photo from Cnet
1. The Video Doorbell Duo by Eufy
With online shopping going through the roof since the start of the pandemic, this video doorbell helps to solve a common problem – package theft. The dual camera system aims at the face of the person approaching and the ground where packages are placed. The bottom camera will send you a notification if someone approaches your package.
2. Amazon’s Astro Household Robot (pictured above)
When gathering feedback from beta testing, Amazon became aware that home security and monitoring was highly desired as a feature of their next home product. The first thing Astro does is to do a scan of the home and identify the different rooms. Users can even tell it which rooms are off limits. Find out all of the info about Astro the robot from Amazon’s VP of Devices here.
Advanced Personal Health Tool
Image via Withings
1. This year, Withings is launching an at-home scale that does a full body composition measurement including nerve activity assessments, cardiovascular insights, and segmental body composition. Because clinical studies have been done on this product, it will be classified as a medical device. This is a wonderful innovation because it gives users more power and understanding over their own bodies.
2. Caregiver Smart Solutions introduced the Aging in Place Core Kit at this year’s CES conference. The kit includes 13 sensors that are placed around the house and monitor movements, behavior, and even patterns (or change in patterns) of the person inside. It’s a significant improvement on the devices used today where emergency medical situations are handled by pushing a button on a necklace. Instead, loved ones can get real-time information sent to an app in their phones to know that everything is alright at home or if they need to call for medical attention.
