From birth to dotage, Philips smart devices make your whole life high-tech
Take a look at the weird and wonderful home and health gadgets shown off by Philips at IFA 2015.
Philips smart gadgets start young.
BERLIN -- The latest gadgets from Philips look out for you from the cradle to the grave. From a gadget that turns your iPhone or Android device into an ultrasound scanner for unborn babies, to location devices for the elderly, via a range of grooming devices to keep you looking good in between -- all connected to apps -- Philips has a lifetime's worth of smart devices coming up.
I caught up with Philips at the annual technology extravaganza IFA here in Germany, and picked some of the coolest and wackiest home and health devices. Check out our gallery below to see them in action.
Several devices are designed to look after your children, because heck knows, you're probably not doing a good enough job on your own. Philips has come up with a system called uGrow that links together various child-focused devices with a suite of apps to track your children and offer suggestions and insights.
Devices include the Philips Avent uGrow Smart Baby Monitor, which streams video of your baby to your phone or tablet, and the uGrow Smart Ear Thermometer, which keeps track of your child's temperature over time.
The uGrow Baby Monitor is out now in parts of Europe and coming to the rest of Europe and the US. The thermometer will launch in parts of Europe in March 2016 and will be available more widely at some point after that.
Bringing up baby and grooming grown-ups with Philips smart gadgets (pictures)
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Philips' help for your kids starts before they're even born, with Lumify, an ultrasound sensor that plugs into a phone or tablet. Aimed at clinicians and healthcare professionals, the handheld Lumify sensor is moved over the abdomen of expectant mothers and feeds a real-time ultrasound image to an app. Caregivers can draw a line on the screen of their phone or tablet to measure the size of the foetus or drop tags onto the image. And if you need a second opinion, the image can be streamed to another doctor to give feedback.
Lumify goes on sale to healthcare professionals in the US later this year.
More grown-up devices include the Smart Shaver 7000, which is a connected electric razor and beard trimmer. And the VisaPure Advanced is a remarkable little device that buffs, brushes and vibrates your skin to a clearer complexion. It'll be on sale only in selected stores that will offer a SkinProfile service: beauty experts will profile your skin and give you a specific brush head to suit your skin type. Your details are stored in an NFC chip in the brush head, so family members can share the VisaPure device and simply swap in their own personalised head.
Other health and wellbeing devices include a sleep apnea mask designed to help you get a better night's rest, light-based pain-relief devices and the Medido automated medication dispenser for the elderly. All of these, of course, connect up to smartphone apps.
For the best of IFA 2015, see CNET's complete coverage.