By Chris Scott Barr

How often would you say you clean your keyboard? I know that it’s a rare thing to do for me, and probably not something most people do on a very regular basis. Sure, we’ve seen keyboards that can be put in a dishwasher, but what about a keyboard that actually cleans itself? Well now there is one of those.

The Vioguard UVKB50 doesn’t clean itself, so much as it disinfects. Whenever you are finished typing, the keyboard retracts into an enclosure and is blasted with a 50W UV light. This will supposedly kill 99.99% of viruses and bacteria. Mysophobes will no doubt rejoice at the introduction of this keyboard next month. However, they may actually fear the $899 price tag more than the germs on their keyboard.

[ Vioguard ] VIA [ SlipperyBrick ]

It might look like nothing more than a Kleenex box-sized humidifier, but this Odor Remediator from Hammacher Schlemmer ($199.95) creates an odor-eliminating mist of microdroplets that are 100 times smaller and 1,000,000 times lighter than what you’d get from an aerosol can. That allows the microdroplets to remain airborne for up to 14 hours, giving them time to drift into every corner of a room, replacing unpleasant smells like smoke with slightly less unpleasant smells like pine, lavender-herb or citrus-mint.

[ Automatic Odor Remediator ] VIA [ bookofjoe ]

Clearly not content with just providing the world with accurate weather forecasts, Oregon Scientific has branched out into other electronic endeavors, including possibly overpriced fitness aides. Their Marathon Pedometer uses an accelerometer to track your footsteps, distance, calories burned and time, so it can be worn around your neck or strapped to a part of your body, and it also allows you to set challenges to see how long it would actually take you to complete something like a marathon. It looks nice and all with its inverted LCD display, but at $59.99 it’s not the cheapest solution out there.

[ Marathon Pedometer ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]

Don’t consider this an endorsement for smoking, but this cigarette shaped butane lighter from DealExtreme is pretty cool. It appears to be the exact same size and shape as a regular cigarette, but features a flip top revealing a tiny flint wheel, and it can be refilled with a standard can of butane gas. And it’s just $1.50.

[ Cigarette-shaped Butane Lighter ] VIA [ BB Gadgets ]

Not only does the Withings Connected Scale look ridiculously stylish with its tempered glass surface, brushed metal accents and inverted LCD display, but its functions actually manage to outweigh its form. It’s able to measure both your weight and body mass index, giving you a better idea of your fitness and health levels, and thanks to a built-in WiFi connection it can upload that data to a website allowing you to monitor your weight and BMI over time in convenient graph form. And the icing on the cake, or maybe the cottage cheese on the celery is a better analogy, is the free WiScale iPhone app which gives you access to those graphs and weight data from your phone. $183 from the Withings website.

[ Withings Connected Scale ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]

By Chris Scott Barr

If you’re looking for a way to kick your smoking habit, there’s a a chance that you’ve at least considered e-cigarette solutions. We’ve seen a few around, and always the manufacturer has gone to great lengths to express how much safer they are from a regular tobacco cigarette. Well apparently you might want to think twice before dropping the cash on one.

According to US health officials, these things might be plenty harmful to your health. First, since they still promote the use of nicotine, they probably won’t help anyone kick the habit. In fact, users will be likely to return to cigarettes. That’s not the biggest concern. Apparently when testing samples from e-cigarette manufacturers NJOY and Smoking Everywhere they found samples with diethylene glycol, which is used in antifreeze, as well as several different carcinogens. Long story short, these things aren’t the way to go if you want to quit smoking.

[ US News ] VIA[ UberGizmo ]

If you feel the need to bring something like a humidifier with you when you travel, odds are you’re not a light packer. But the Air-O-Swiss Travel Humidifier is compact enough for even those who travel with just a backpack since it doesn’t have a built-in water tank. Instead, it uses a plastic water bottle which you simply cap with a special adapter and the stick into the device. Ultrasonic technology is then used to produce a micro-fine mist which is blown into the room where it evaporates, increasing the humidity. It also comes with a handy transcontinental AC adapter and exchangeable plugs allowing it to be used in any country, and there’s even an auto-shut-off for when the bottle runs dry in the middle of the night. $59.99 from Air-O-Swiss.

[ Air-O-Swiss Travel Humidifier ]

The next time you have a heart attack (that’s supposed to be a weekly occurrence right?) how would you like it if the person performing CPR on you was trained at home via a PC app using the Nintendo Wiimote? Well that’s exactly what biomedical engineering undergraduate students from the University of Alabama at Birmingham have in mind. And given the fact that the American Heart Association has pledged $50,000 to fund their research, the idea must have some merit.

The students have been working on the concept since last January, and this past Spring a working prototype of the technology was demonstrated which is when the AHA stepped in and offered the grant. If all goes well, the UAB Wii CPR software would be made available for download from the American Heart Association website as open source code as early as this Fall. And I think the Wii Vitality sensor which Nintendo introduced at E3 this year has finally found its killer life-saving application.

[ PR - UAB Students’ Nintendo Wii CPR Earns American Heart Association Support ] VIA [ Popular Science ]

As the story goes, Paul Wessel noticed that his diabetic son Luke was always misplacing his blood glucose meter, though he never had any trouble finding his Game Boy. So Paul worked with pharmaceutical giant Bayer to develop the Didget which is a blood glucose meter that connects to the Nintendo DS and DS Lite systems. (It requires the slot 2 port so unfortunately it’s not DSi-friendly.)

It works like a standard blood glucose meter, you prick your finger and then insert the blood-soaked paper strip into the reader, but the test results are converted into reward points that kids can use to unlock new levels and items inside the Didget NDS game. The basic idea is to reward kids who regularly check their blood sugar levels which hopefully helps them develop good testing habits in the future.

According to the Didget website, the device will sell for about $50, though since it’s actually a UK-based site, there’s no word on if or when this will be available in North America.

[ Bayer Didget ] VIA [ Boing Boing ]

So not only are video games destroying our minds, our physiques and the fabric of moral society, but now it turns out they’re not so great for our wrists either. Well at least the standard game controllers aren’t. That’s why a company called Smartfish, known for their ergonomic peripherals, have developed the PRO:Motion Game Controller.

Since everyone’s hands and wrists aren’t the same, the PRO:Motion gamepad can actually bend and rotate in the middle to create a more comfortable and ergonomically friendly controller for every user. But here’s the really cool part. Using the company’s DPC or ‘Dynamic Positioning Controller’ system, the PRO:Motion will actually study your “usage pattern” and make periodic but nearly imperceptible adjustments to the controller via a set of tiny onboard motors. So in other words, you don’t have to futz around with it to find the perfect angles, it will do it for you automatically.

Unfortunately pricing info doesn’t seem to be readily available at this time, and from what I can tell the PRO:Motion is only designed to work with PC games, and not with any of the major consoles on the market.

[ Smartfish PRO:Motion Game Controller ] VIA [ Everything USB ]