Smart Ice Cubes Tell When You've Had Enough Alcohol

dstates writes "In just 6 weeks an MIT researcher created smart ice cubes that monitor your drinking. After an alcohol induced blackout motivated a bit of introspection (video), Dhairya Dand pulled together a coin cell battery, an ATtiny microcontroller, and an IR transceiver molded into gelatin to create self-aware glowing ice-cubes. The cubes glow and beat to the ambient music, but more importantly, they know how fast and how much you are drinking, and they change color from green to orange to finally red as you reach your safe limit. If things go too far, the ice cubes can connect to your smartphone and send a text message for a friend come get you. Of course, you have to remember not to swallow them."

Comments

Re:Nerd creates solution in search of a problem...

[Jmc23]

If you don't understand how something works, probably best not to criticize how you think it won't work without explaining why it's a bad idea. Given a decent accelerometer and an intelligent algorithm (I can already see it, you however, can not) you can have accurate readings for practical use.