twitter from the womb

Ok... thanks mashable for this, somewhat disturbing post.It's really got me thinking further about mashing the real and interactive worlds. Banging on about world 2.0 again, we've seen mars landers, horses, plants, houses and yes unborn babies sending their voices out into the ether using channels like twitter, how can we combine this thinking into the products we help our clients sell. There was a lot of talk around the 'product as marketing' thinking, how about product as interactive channel? Ideas?

Think you’re an early adopter, huh? @kickbee has you beat.

Expectant father Corey Menscher wanted to “create a device that would give me a chance to be aware of our baby’s movements”. He created a waistband for his wife which sends a Tweet everytime the baby kicks, naming the project “Kickbee”. Corey writes:

The Kickbee is a wearable device made of a stretchable band and embedded electronics and sensors. Piezo sensors are attached directly to the band, and transmit small but detectable voltages when triggered by movement underneath. An Arduino Mini microcontroller transmits the signals to an accompanying Java application wirelessly via Bluetooth. (a SparkFun BlueSMIRF v2 module that communicates serially with a Macbook Pro)

The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API. I chose to use Twitter because it is easy to initiate an SMS message to any mobile phone when a kick is detected. It also acts as a data log that can be accessed programmatically for visualization or archiving.

What do you think: a sweet gesture of solidarity with his wife, or a bit too much time on his hands?

See also: TwitterThings: 6 Unusual Entities That Tweet