Tag: wearable technology

The new wearables from Fit Pay could soon make it possible for people to pay for products with a flick of the wrist.

Owners of Pebble Time wearable technology devices may soon be able to take advantage of the convenience of contactless mobile payments among the other benefits of wearing their gadgets.

A Pagaré smartstrap Kickstarter campaign was recently launched by Fit Pay to make this happen.

The funding for this wearable technology would be used to support its final production and to be able to bring it to market. The Pagaré payment smartstrap has NFC technology embedded into it, as well as card network tokenization. In that way, it will be possible for these wearables to be read by any POS terminal with an NFC reader, which is quite commonplace at retail checkout counters around the world.

Essentially, if the NFC contactless payments symbol is displayed at a checkout counter, this wearable technology is compatible.

To use the smartstrap wearables, a user would simply need to wave his or her wrist over the reader terminal at the POS counter. In that way, the transaction can be completed and the wearer would never have to take out a wallet and swipe or tap a card. It wouldn’t even require a smartphone to be used, as is the case with other types of mobile wallet that have been trying to achieve widespread adoption over the last few years.

According to the chief exec at Pebble, Eric Migicovsky, “It’s a great example of how our open platform allows Pebble to become even more useful in the everyday lives of more people.” There are still a few weeks left to the Fit Pay campaign, as it will run until March 9 in order to bring in the $120,000 it requires from backers in order to get these wearables moving forward.

The company is currently working directly with the suppliers for Pebble in order to be able to provide the smartstrap wearable technology in exactly the same materials, finishes and colors as the Pebble Time, the Time Steel and the Time Round smartwatches. In that way, form will not be sacrificed to function.

These wearable technology gadgets are highly popular but may also be used for legal purposes.

Consumers who purchase and use fitness trackers for the purposes of monitoring their health and activity levels may be surprised to discover that those same devices could actually be used against them in a court of law.

This type of wearable technology can monitor a lot about a person, providing useful legal evidence.

Various types of fitness trackers have been flying off the shelves, from Fitbits to Jawbones and smartwatches. They are used to track your steps and calorie burning, as well as your heart rate and sleep, in some cases. However, in a court of law, this can also provide a considerable amount of information to help to determine what the wearer was doing at the time of an incident. According to Bruce Hagen, an attorney from Atlanta whose firm has a specialty in bicycle accident cases, “This is the same as the black box data you would get on a car or a truck or an airplane.” Hagen has been requesting fitness data from his clients for a year.

The fitness trackers help to show how active a person was before an incident occurred.

While the wearable technology was being used to track the wearer’s activity, it can actually provide a record of that individual’s life. Some situations allow the data to be used to reveal how active a person had been, on average, before an accident, and how that trend changed following a crash. This type of data can help to provide evidence with regards to a person’s honesty about the impact an accident has had on their lives or “it can also catch them in a lie if it comes to that,” explained Hagen.

The first time this type of evidence from wearables was ever used was from a case in rural Pennsylvania. As it turned out, the law enforcement officers from the case were the ones who thought of accessing the data from the wearable technology.

The case involved a 911 call in which a Florida woman reported a sexual assault by an unknown intruder while she had been staying at her boss’s home. For a number of reasons, Detective Chris Jones started to doubt the woman’s case as he conducted his investigation. He then realized that she had a Fitbit, and he requested her login and password in order to access the information stored within her tracking account.

The fitness tracker data showed that the wearer had taken around 1,000 steps between the time she claimed to have gone to bed and the time and phoning the police. This evidence held up in court, revealing that she had been taking the steps as she staged the crime scene.