Samsung to demo a smart belt: Will it be good for your waist or just a waste?
Samsung will demonstrate a belt dubbed WELT, which will track eating habits, steps, sitting time and your waist size.
Samsung at CES will demo a smart belt that will monitor waist size, eating habits and steps in the latest sign that everything will be wearable and have some technology built-in.
The consumer electronics giant outlined three of its C-Lab demonstrations it will show off at CES 2016 in Las Vegas. The three projects are WELT, which is the health tracking belt, a virtual reality handset control and a wearable communications system for smart devices.
Also see: CNET's CES coverage
According to Samsung, the company's plan is to float these projects at CES collect feedback and then refine the efforts at its innovation labs.
With that in mind, it's worth pondering WELT. Here's Samsung's outline of the project:
WELT is a smart wearable healthcare belt that looks like a normal belt, thus offering consumers a more discreet way of using smart sensor technology to monitor their health. WELT is capable of recording the user's waist size, eating habits and the number of steps taken, as well as time spent sitting down. It then sends this data to a specially-designed app for analysis, and the production of a range of personalized healthcare and weight management plans.
Certainly, a belt would be discreet, but the mission has the potential to be a wearable nag. Do you chuck the WELT belt during Thanksgiving? Eating habits are worth tracking, but the people that would need the weight management the most are going to hate WELT. Does recording waist size really mean much of anything over short durations?
Here's the rub: When most of us are trying to figure out what to do with smartwatches Samsung floats a smart belt. The feedback at CES should be interesting.