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Comment by vertex-four | Hacker News Reader

As a young person who wants to remember to take her pills, to cut down on her soda consumption, to track how much she exercises (and maybe turn it into a game of walking further every week), and no doubt some more that I can't think of right now, this product sounds like it'd be amazing.

The video is a brilliant marketing asset. It showed me some very real problems of mine, and how it could help me solve them (by tracking things that I want to, and gamifying them).

The only issue is cost. As a young, single person, £166 is prohibitively expensive. It's likely not worth it for me. Is it worth it for people with families and kids? If they had £166 to spend, could they find something more pressing to spend it on?

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I'll save you money. I'll be Dad. Stop drinking soda and walk more.

You're really bad dad if that is the best advice you can give.

Floss twice a day and buy a pedometer.

This comment is fantastic! The trend in pointless analytics is annoying and isn't solving any real problems. All the ‘problems’ Mother solves are not really problems and it doesn’t seem to serve any truly useful purpose.

Wakeup times - Already solved by the alarm on your clock. Managing drink consumption - Drink more or less than you currently do. Staying fit/active - Go workout/exercise once a day. Step tracking - One of the more silly trends lately. Does it honestly matter how many steps you took today? No, not really. Pill taking - A weekly pill container solves this already for a few dollars and is old person friendly. Check-ins - Have your kid text/call you when they arrive home. Can’t use a phone? Don’t leave them alone. Brushing teeth - Does anyone here not brush their teeth? Anyone at all? Guess that problem doesn’t really exist. Temperature - Look at your thermostat. If you really care, go buy some nest products, they got you covered.

This product tries to make you feel like you have no idea what is going on in your everyday life (but don’t worry, they can help!). You have your own daily pattern and I guarantee you know what happens in it already. Don’t get me wrong, this thing has potential in other specialized areas but for its intended purpose and what most people will end up using it for, it’ just more gadget bloat.

Many people have little to no idea how much alcohol they really drink each week.

Pill management is considerably more tricky than that for some people - especially if there are young people in the house. Some medications have strict and weird requirements to when and how they're taken.

Does mother know that you've eaten or have an empty stomach ?

Yes, mother weighs your poo.

Unless you put a tracker on every bottle you own and the ones at the bar, this won't solve the drinking issue.

As for pill management, I'm not sure what problems you are talking about with young people but I do know the issue with pills. I currently live with an elderly couple that have to take a huge amount of different pills. They just use multiple weekly pill bottles with a time/requirement note. Cheap and non-complicated to work with.

"Check-ins - Have your kid text/call you when they arrive home. Can’t use a phone? Don’t leave them alone."

Or better yet: Leave them alone and stop hovering. The world is safer today than it has ever been, and yet parental paranoia is at an all time high.

I agree completely, I'm simply saying for the overprotective ones, you don't need this toy

If this product isn't a joke, then yeah.

I don't see how it's not. Is "hi mom/dad" being disrupted by innovative technology?

To summarise your comment: "Bah, Humbug."

More seriously, I think you're being way too dismissive. The same train of logic could apply to any tech advances we've had. Email? Use letters. Smartphones? Use a proper computer. Social networks? Use a paper address book. Do you feel the same about those?

Compliance is a big problem for medicine. Motivating people (nay, yourself) to be active is a problem. Keeping track of shopping/groceries is a problem in a busy or shared house. Whether they are enough of a problem to build a business around is another question.

I disagree that the same train of logic could be applied to other big tech advances. The pieces of tech you stated are better than the alternative by leaps and bounds. They all reduce the time (and money) it takes to communicate by huge margins.

For medication, I can only speak from personal experience and I could be completely off base. As far as motivation, my active friends don't use/care about fitness apps and my inactive friends can't be bothered to use the bloody things anyway. Obviously this all comes back to personal experience and I would love to be proved wrong (always interesting seeing a product/service you think is crap get huge) but until it takes off I am skeptical of its actual value

It's for your inactive friends who want to become active.

One of the things that you'll notice if you go to /r/loseit is how obsessively weight losers will measure everything. It's a way to keep themselves focused and accountable.

I can see the uses for this, just, as many people are saying, very creepy branding.

That's not what the parent comment is saying. I share her/his view that this is pretty lame, and I don't mind being dismissive about it.

Adding more dongles to a problem doesn't fix it. Are the people who would be best served with this really sitting around with an iPad and dongles?

I'm surprised this isn't just a big joke.

The teeth brushing thing is aimed at parents. Children can be very difficult when it comes to encouraging them to brush their teeth, either forgetting or lying, etc.

The encouragement aspect seems to be the most promising I won't deny that. I hated brushing as a kid, and tricked my parents into thinking I did. Kids are smart, if they don't want to brush and know all they have to do is shake the thing to make it look like they are brushing, they will.

Comes down to playing a more active role in their life instead of just tracking their activities.

I think it will track how long it's been shaken, right?

After tricking you for a week by shaking the brush for 1-2min, perhaps it'll form enough of a habit that going to actual brushing won't be as hard (we tend to be attached to the things we hold more often).

Kids think they're fooling you but the joke's on them...

Exactly, if you could fool it by picking it up and putting it back, that'd be one thing. But otherwise if you're forced the stand there shaking it for a couple of minutes, you might as well be brushing your teeth.

> All the ‘problems’ Mother solves are not really problems and it doesn’t seem to serve any truly useful purpose.

Having just returned home from visiting my grandmother a few moments before I looked at this, the first thing that jumped out at me was "Did you take your pills?"

Fortunately, she is in good health but, like most elderly folks, I imagine, has a number of medications that she takes. Some are taken once a day, others twice, and there might even be some taken more frequently.

I, myself, am still in "recovery mode" after being on the losing end of a head-on motorcycle vs. Jeep collision. I'm not several different medications any more but I was for a good while and it was difficult for me to keep track of them.

I'll grant you that there are alternative solutions to these problems -- a family member who lives with my grandmother simply writes down (on paper!) when she takes what, for example, and you mentioned another (weekly pill container) -- but for the busy/active/always on-the-go person, I can certainly see them filling a need.

"Okay, now I want to bring it back home. My mother's eighty-one. She doesn't get around as easily as she once did. A year ago she broke her hip, and since then I've been concerned about her. I asked her to have some security cameras installed, so I could access them on a closed circuit, but she refused. But now I have piece of mind. Last weekend, while she was napping--"

A wave of laughter rippled through the audience.

"Forgive! Forgive me!" he said, "I had no choice. She wouldn't have let me do it otherwise. So I snuck in, and I installed cameras in every room. They're so small she'll never notice. I'll show you really quick. Can we show cameras 1 to 5 in my mom's house?"

A grid of images popped up, including his mom, padding down a bright hallway in a towel. A roar of laughter erupted.

"Oops. Let's drop that one." The image disappeared. "Anyway. The point is I know she's safe, and that gives me a sense of peace. As we all know here at the Circle, transparency leads to peace of mind."

when I needed to take some pills the combination of a smartphone reminder prompt to take pills, making part of my morning routine and pillbox divided by day (which mostly helped me remember if I'd already taken them) worked for me.

My grandmother who, like many older people takes many different pills, gets an advanced version of the pillbox direct from the pharmacy, with all her various pills combined into a giant blister pack according to her own schedule for taking them.

Oh yeah, I've seen those blister packs! Big roll of sealed compartments, one for every day. Whoever came up with that idea is a friggin' genius.

> Managing drink consumption - Drink more or less than you currently do.

You know that the human mind doesn't work like that -- mine doesn't, at any rate. Reminders, bribes, little games played around chores, those things tend to work.

Gamification is a powerful motivator. People will start jog/brush teeth, similarly to answering questions on stackoverflow. It doesn't work on everybody, but it works.

I agree, I can tell you this would work on my kids: if there is a ranking for brushing teeth they'd be much more inclined not to miss it.

Sure, there are other solutions to solve this problem. But I like this one.

> A weekly pill container solves this already for a few dollars and is old person friendly.

Disagree. Old people still forget such things. Or to refill them.

I think the marketing is ultra creepy, but with a tiny bit of rebranding, I think it would be perfect to help the elderly.

Maybe add a little red cross on it and rename it "Nurse", or something.

A bit snarky, but I get your point, absolutely. These problems are solvable today, and I'm working on them. I was mostly pointing out that the price is completely out of my range, as I see this as "something to help".

We both agree that this is unnecessary; but it's at a price point which makes it seem that the creators think it's a necessity. There's a great many more useful things I could buy with £166.

Yeah, sorry for the snark.

I know fitbit exists (for exercising/walking).

There are also - I think - pill reminder apps & programs. At least DuckDuckGo sez so.

For soda consumption, I recommend coffee (for caffeine) and selzer water w/ lime juice for the fizzies & casual drinking.

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