Wow! This is pretty mental. I know a while back someone had managed to get a Linux kernel running on the iPhone, but there wasnt much to see and I soon forgot about it. It appears now however that PlanetBeing from the Dev-Team has managed to take an Android build and get it to run on the iPhone! Check out the video of it below:
Very cool stuff. I cant wait to see some Flash 10.1 running on that!
Well after a little deliberation I decided to go for it and take a leap and pre-order a “WakeMate“. Mainly as an experiment but partially to fuel the geeky gadget lover inside of me, but I do think this sort of thing is a natural extension to our techno-obsessed lifestyle.
Im a big fan of Science-Fiction, and my favourite author is Peter F. Hamilton. In the vast majority of his books he portrays a future where humans and technology merge, generally just an extension of the shrinking of personal gadget devices (think iPhone) down to microscopic scales which can then be embedded in the body (nano-robotics). These personal devices then allow the user to interface with the internet directly, without screens or input devices. This I think is a logical direction of our shrinking hardware and smarter software.
Glimpses of this future have already been seen with basic data-visual augmentation apps such as Layar for the iPhone. In addition to the ‘net-interface’ capability of the technologies described by Peter F. the micro-devices are capable of reading biometric data from the body directly and also capable of modifying and augmenting the bodies own capabilities.
So back to the point of this post. I think that Wake Mate is a tentative step in the direction towards the “personal doctor” and “human augmentation”. What it does is monitor your sleeping pattern through a wrist-band you put on when you go to bed. As you sleep it records your cycles and if you set it to, it can wake you when it considers is the best time, so you always wake up feeling refreshed.
Thats the concept anyways. I have no idea if it will work, but as a techno-gadget-geek im willing to give it a shot for $50 
P.S. I would like to point out that Wake Mate isnt the first to make such an app. Zeo Sleep Coach has been around for a while selling a product, it however, is 5 times more expensive than Wake Mate and doesnt interface with the iPhone.
FoodScanner is an iPhone app that lets you scan a barcode and it then tells you about its nutritional info. Whats frustrating is that I had this idea over a year ago, the idea was that you scan an item, enter how much of it you ate, then the app keeps a running daily total of the amount of GDA of calories, fats, salts and more.
I didn’t chase it up as although I knew it possible to read a barcode from an image, it would of been difficult to tally the code to a specific item as each store has its own identification numbers.
Ah well, im sure now the idea has been proven we will be seeing Tesco, Sainsburys etc bringing out their own “measure your nutritional input” iPhone app!
