by Hans Rempel, on December 30, 2010
Texas Instruments came out with a neat $49 Chronos ez430 Wireless Watch Development Kit. The dev kit is based on their low-power wireless + processor ez430 chipset but looks/works just like a real watch. Check out the public dashboard.
We recently posted a developer project at http://exosite.com/project/ti_chronos_pc_gateway that details how to hook the wireless sensor data from the watch up to Exosite Portals. The project uses a USB wireless access point attached to a PC running a python script that handles shuttling the data from the access point to Exosite.
Although I'm sure developers using the watch may get some use out of the project as-is, the interesting thing is how this can be extended in commercial applications. The Chronos watch incorporates lot sensor technology similar to active RFID tags currently on the market (temp sensors, tamper-detect, g-shock, patient location). At the $49 price-point, I'd be surprised if the watch and/or underlying technologies don't take off in a big way in developer communities and in commercial situations in the near future.
P.S. As a follow-on to this proof-of-concept, we've also attached the watch to a cellular network so that a PC base-station isn't required to remotely monitor the watch data - more on that later.